Wave chaos in rapidly rotating stars.

The effects of rapid stellar rotation on acoustic oscillation modes are poorly understood. We study the dynamics of acoustic rays in rotating polytropic stars and show using quantum chaos concepts that the eigenfrequency spectrum is a superposition of regular frequency patterns and an irregular frequency subset respectively associated with near-integrable and chaotic phase space regions. This opens fresh perspectives for rapidly rotating star seismology and also provides a potentially observable manifestation of wave chaos in a large-scale natural system.