Issue |
J. Space Weather Space Clim.
Volume 4, 2014
Solar variability, solar forcing, and coupling mechanisms in the terrestrial atmosphere
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A15 | |
Number of page(s) | 9 | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/swsc/2014011 | |
Published online | 14 May 2014 |
Regular Article
Photometric magnetic-activity metrics tested with the Sun: application to Kepler M dwarfs
1
Space Science Institute, 4750 Walnut Street, Suite #205, Boulder, CO, USA
2
Laboratoire AIM, CEA/DSM – CNRS – Univ. Paris Diderot – IRFU/SAp, Centre de Saclay, 91191
Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
* Corresponding author: smathur@spacescience.org
Received:
18
September
2013
Accepted:
1
April
2014
The Kepler mission has been providing high-quality photometric data leading to many breakthroughs in the exoplanet search and in stellar physics. Stellar magnetic activity results from the interaction between rotation, convection, and magnetic field. Constraining these processes is important if we want to better understand stellar magnetic activity. Using the Sun, we want to test a magnetic activity index based on the analysis of the photometric response and then apply it to a sample of M dwarfs observed by Kepler. We estimate a global stellar magnetic activity index by measuring the standard deviation of the whole time series, Sph. Because stellar variability can be related to convection, pulsations or magnetism, we need to ensure that this index mostly takes into account magnetic effects. We define another stellar magnetic activity index as the average of the standard deviation of shorter subseries which lengths are determined by the rotation period of the star. This way we can ensure that the measured photometric variability is related to starspots crossing the visible stellar disc. This new index combined with a time-frequency analysis based on the Morlet wavelets allows us to determine the existence of magnetic activity cycles. We measure magnetic indexes for the Sun and for 34 M dwarfs observed by Kepler. As expected, we obtain that the sample of M dwarfs studied in this work is much more active than the Sun. Moreover, we find a small correlation between the rotation period and the magnetic index. Finally, by combining a time-frequency analysis with phase diagrams, we discover the presence of long-lived features suggesting the existence of active longitudes on the surface of these stars.
Key words: Stellar activity / Solar activity / Asteroseismology / M dwarfs
© S. Mathur et al., Published by EDP Sciences 2014
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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