Abstract :
[en] Stars in the night sky are not as quiet as they seem. A human being wandering on Earth few billions years ago would have seen a different night sky, with different stars forming different constellations. Moving forward in time, he would have been the witness of stellar evolution as some stars would have suddenly shined while others disappeared forever.
Hard to realize at a time scale of human life, stars are born, evolve, and die in a limited lifetime which can last only a few million years for the most massive to trillion years for the less massive. Fortunately, it is not necessary to wait that long to study the formation and evolution of stars.
Stellar evolution can be studied on shorter time scales, on thousands of stars, at various evolutionary stages.
This is of great importance as stars shape the Universe and produce the chemical elements at the origin of life. Probing the internal structure of stars is however very challenging due to the opacity barrier of their superficial layers. One way to get around this issue is to study and interpret stellar pulsations. As seismologists extract information about Earth interior trough the study of earthquakes, asteroseismologists can study the internal structure of stars by studying their oscillations. In this thesis, this technique is used to study the internal structure and evolution of massive stars which are at least eight times more massive than our Sun and which have a spectral type between O and B.
The first part of this work is devoted to the determination of the $\kappa$-mechanism instability domains for massive stars. In order to extend the computations to the post-main sequence phase of evolution, we develop a numerical technique in which the non-adiabatic computations for the stellar core are made, independently than for the envelope, within the quasi-adiabatic and the asymptotic treatment. In a second step, we investigate the pulsations modes in O main sequence stars and in B post-main sequence stars. The presence of g-modes in post-main sequence stars is closely related to the internal structure of the star and we study the effects of several physical factors on the occurrence of these modes. Finally, the last part of this work is dedicated to the characterization of strange mode pulsations. In particular, we focus on strange modes having an adiabatic counterpart, which are trapped into a superficial cavity. The effect of the model atmosphere on the excitation is investigated in addition to the characterization of their eigenfunctions.
