English

Stellar activity with LAMOST. I. Spot configuration in Pleiades

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2016-09-29 v1

Abstract

We use the spectra of Pleiades and field stars from LAMOST DR2 archive to study how spottedness and activity vary as a function of mass at young ages. We obtained standard TiO band strength by measuring TiO bands near 7050 A˚\AA from LAMOST spectra (R\approx1800) for large sample of field GKM dwarfs with solar metallicity. Analysis show that active dwarfs, including late G- and early K-type, have extra TiO absorption compare to inactive counterparts, indicating the presence of cool spots on their surface. Active late K- and M-dwarfs show deeper TiO2 and shallower TiO4 compare to inactive stars at a given TiO5, which could be partly explained through cool spots. We estimated cool spot fractional coverage for 304 Pleiades candidates by modelling their TiO2 (&TiO5) band strength with respect to standard value. Results show that surface of large fraction of K- and M-type members have very large spot coverage (\sim50%). We analysed a correlation between spot coverage, rotation and the amplitude of light variation, and found spot coverage on slow rotators (RoR_{o} > 0.1) increases with decreasing Rossby Number RoR_{o}. Interestingly, we detected a saturation-like feature for spot coverage in fast rotators with a saturation level of 40%-50%. In addition, spot distribution in hotter fast rotators show more symmetrical compare to slow rotators. More interestingly, we detected large spot coverage in many M type members with no or little light variation. In bigger picture, these results provide important constraints for stellar dynamo on these cool active stars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.05452,
  title  = {Stellar activity with LAMOST. I. Spot configuration in Pleiades},
  author = {Xiang-Song Fang and Gang Zhao and Jing-Kun Zhao and Yu-Qin Chen and Yerra Bharat Kumar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.05452},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

20 pages, 20 figures