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Register a new userStellar magnetic cycles in the solar-like stars Kepler-17 and Kepler-63
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The stellar magnetic field plays a crucial role in the star internal mechanisms, as in the interactions with its environment. The study of starspots provides information about the stellar magnetic field, and can characterise the cycle. Moreover, the analysis of solar-type stars is also useful to shed light onto the origin of the solar magnetic field. The objective of this work is to characterise the magnetic activity of stars. Here, we studied two solar-type stars Kepler-17 and Kepler-63 using two methods to estimate the magnetic cycle length. The first one characterises the spots (radius, intensity, and location) by fitting the small variations in the light curve of a star caused by the occultation of a spot during a planetary transit. This approach yields the number of spots present in the stellar surface and the flux deficit subtracted from the star by their presence during each transit. The second method estimates the activity from the excess in the residuals of the transit lightcurves. This excess is obtained by subtracting a spotless model transit from the lightcurve, and then integrating all the residuals during the transit. The presence of long term periodicity is estimated in both time series. With the first method, we obtained $P_{rm cycle}$ = 1.12 $pm$ 0.16 yr (Kepler-17) and $P_{rm cycle}$ = 1.27 $pm$ 0.16 yr (Kepler-63), and for the second approach the values are 1.35 $pm$ 0.27 yr and 1.27 $pm$ 0.12 yr, respectively. The results of both methods agree with each other and confirm their robustness.
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Observations of various solar-type stars along decades revealed that they can have magnetic cycles, just like our Sun. An investigation of the relation between their cycle length and rotation period can shed light on the dynamo mechanisms operating in these stars. Previous works on this relation suggested that the stars could be separated into active and inactive branches, with the Sun falling between them. In this work, we determined short magnetic activity cycles for 6 active solar-type stars observed by the Kepler telescope. The method adopted here estimates the activity from the excess in the residuals of the transitlight curves. This excess is obtained by subtracting a spotless model transit from the light curve, and then integrating over all the residuals during the transit. The presence of long term periodicity is estimated from the analysis of a Lomb-Scargle periodogram of the complete time series. Finally, we investigate the rotation-cycle period relation for the stars analysed here and find that some active stars do not follow the behaviour proposed earlier, falling in the inactive branch. In addition, we also notice a considerable spread from other stars in the literature in the active/inactive branches.
Magnetic activity on stars manifests itself in the form of dark spots on the stellar surface, that cause modulation of a few percent in the light curve of the star as it rotates. When a planet eclipses its host star, it might cross in front of one of these spots creating a bump in the transit light curve. By modelling these spot signatures, it is possible to determine the physical properties of the spots such as size, temperature, and location. In turn, the monitoring of the spots longitude provides estimates of the stellar rotation and differential rotation. This technique was applied to the star Kepler-17, a solar--type star orbited by a hot Jupiter. The model yields the following spot characteristics: average radius of $49 pm 10$ Mm, temperatures of $5100 pm 300$ K, and surface area coverage of $6 pm 4$ %. The rotation period at the transit latitude, $-5^circ$, occulted by the planet was found to be $11.92 pm 0.05$ d, slightly smaller than the out--of--transit average period of $12.4 pm 0.1$ d. Adopting a solar like differential rotation, we estimated the differential rotation of Kepler-17 to be $DeltaOmega = 0.041 pm 0.005$ rd/d, which is close to the solar value of 0.050 rd/d, and a relative differential rotation of $DeltaOmega/Omega=8.0 pm 0.9$ %. Since Kepler-17 is much more active than our Sun, it appears that for this star larger rotation rate is more effective in the generation of magnetic fields than shear.
The determination of exoplanet properties and occurrence rates using Kepler data critically depends on our knowledge of the fundamental properties (such as temperature, radius and mass) of the observed stars. We present revised stellar properties for 197,096 Kepler targets observed between Quarters 1-17 (Q1-17), which were used for the final transiting planet search run by the Kepler Mission (Data Release 25, DR25). Similar to the Q1--16 catalog by Huber et al. the classifications are based on conditioning published atmospheric parameters on a grid of Dartmouth isochrones, with significant improvements in the adopted methodology and over 29,000 new sources for temperatures, surface gravities or metallicities. In addition to fundamental stellar properties the new catalog also includes distances and extinctions, and we provide posterior samples for each stellar parameter of each star. Typical uncertainties are ~27% in radius, ~17% in mass, and ~51% in density, which is somewhat smaller than previous catalogs due to the larger number of improved logg constraints and the inclusion of isochrone weighting when deriving stellar posterior distributions. On average, the catalog includes a significantly larger number of evolved solar-type stars, with an increase of 43.5% in the number of subgiants. We discuss the overall changes of radii and masses of Kepler targets as a function of spectral type, with particular focus on exoplanet host stars.
The study of young Sun-like stars is of fundamental importance to understand the magnetic activity and rotational evolution of the Sun. Space-borne photometry by the Kepler telescope provides unprecedented datasets to investigate these phenomena in Sun-like stars. We present a new analysis of the entire Kepler photometric time series of the moderately young Sun-like star Kepler-17 that is accompanied by a transiting hot Jupiter. We applied a maximum-entropy spot model to the long-cadence out-of-transit photometry of the target to derive maps of the starspot filling factor versus the longitude and the time. These maps are compared to the spots occulted during transits to validate our reconstruction and derive information on the latitudes of the starspots. We find two main active longitudes on the photosphere of Kepler-17, one of which has a lifetime of at least $sim 1400$ days, although with a varying level of activity. The latitudinal differential rotation is of solar type, that is, with the equator rotating faster than the poles. We estimate a minimum relative amplitude $Delta Omega/ Omega$ between $sim 0.08 pm 0.05$ and $0.14 pm 0.05$, our determination being affected by the finite lifetime of individual starspots and depending on the adopted spot model parameters. We find marginal evidence of a short-term intermittent activity cycle of $sim 48$ days and an indication of a longer cycle of $400-600$ days characterized by an equatorward migration of the mean latitude of the spots as in the Sun. The rotation of Kepler-17 is likely to be significantly affected by the tides raised by its massive close-by planet. We confirm the reliability of maximum-entropy spot models to map starspots in young active stars and characterize the activity and differential rotation of this young Sun-like planetary host.
We present a novel method for estimating lower-limit surface gravities log g of Kepler targets whose data do not allow the detection of solar-like oscillations. The method is tested using an ensemble of solar-type stars observed in the context of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium. We then proceed to estimate lower-limit log g for a cohort of Kepler solar-type planet-candidate host stars with no detected oscillations. Limits on fundamental stellar properties, as provided by this work, are likely to be useful in the characterization of the corresponding candidate planetary systems. Furthermore, an important byproduct of the current work is the confirmation that amplitudes of solar-like oscillations are suppressed in stars with increased levels of surface magnetic activity.
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