Context. In the era of precision stellar astrophysics, classical pulsating stars play a crucial role in probing the cosmological distance scale, thanks to their period-luminosity (PL) relations. Therefore, it is important to constrain their stellar evolution and pulsation models not only through a comparison of empirical and theoretical PL relations and properties at mean light, but also using their light curve structure over the complete pulsation cycle.
Aims. We carry out an extensive light curve comparison of BL Her stars using observations from Gaia DR3 and stellar pulsation models computed using mesa-rsp with the goal to obtain the best-matched modeled-observed pairs for BL Her stars in the LMC.
Methods. We use the Fourier decomposition technique to analyse the light curves in the G band obtained from Gaia DR3 and from mesa-rsp and use a robust light curve fitting approach to score the modeled-observed pairs with respect to their pulsation periods and over their Fourier parameter space.
Results. We obtain the best-fit models for 48 BL Her stars in the LMC and thereby provide the stellar parameter estimates of these stars, 30 of which are labelled as the gold sample with superior light curve fits. We find a relatively flat distribution of stellar masses between 0.5–0.65 M⊙ for the gold sample of modeled-observed pairs. An interesting result is that the majority of the best-matched models in the gold sample are computed using the convection parameter sets without radiative cooling. The period-Wesenheit relation for the best-matched gold sample of 30 BL Her models exhibits a slope of −2.805 ± 0.164 while the corresponding period-radius relation exhibits a slope of 0.565 ± 0.035, both in good agreement with the empirical PW and PR slopes from BL Her stars in the LMC, respectively. We also used the Wesenheit magnitudes of the 30 best-matched modeled-observed pairs to estimate a distance modulus of µLMC = 18.582 ± 0.067 to the LMC, which lies within the bounds of previous literature values. We also discuss the degeneracy in the stellar parameters of the BL Her models that result in similar pulsation periods and light curve structure, and highlight that caution must be exercised while using the stellar parameter estimates.