Hydrodynamical simulations of convection-related stellar micro-variability. II. The enigmatic granulation background of the COROT target HD49933

TL;DR

This study uses hydrodynamical simulations to model and compare the granulation-related micro-variability of stars, specifically HD49933 and the Sun, with space-based observations, revealing discrepancies and potential influences of metallicity and magnetic fields.

Contribution

It introduces a method to predict stellar granulation background using hydrodynamical models and compares these predictions with observational data for HD49933 and the Sun.

Findings

Model accurately predicts solar granulation background.

Overestimation of granulation power in HD49933 by a factor of 2-3.

Magnetic fields unlikely to explain the discrepancy.

Abstract

Local-box hydrodynamical model atmospheres provide statistical information about a star's emergent radiation field which allows one to predict the level of its granulation-related micro-variability. Space-based photometry is now sufficiently accurate to test model predictions. We aim to model the photometric granulation background of HD49933 as well as the Sun, and compare the predictions to the measurements obtained by the COROT and SOHO satellite missions. We construct hydrodynamical model atmospheres representing HD49933 and the Sun, and use a previously developed scaling technique to obtain the observable disk-integrated brightness fluctuations. We further performed exploratory magneto-hydrodynamical simulations to gauge the impact of small scale magnetic fields on the synthetic light-curves. We find that the granulation-related brightness fluctuations depend on metallicity. We obtain a satisfactory correspondence between prediction and observation for the Sun, validating our approach. For HD49933, we arrive at a significant over-estimation by a factor of two to three in total power. Locally generated magnetic fields are unlikely to be responsible, otherwise existing fields would need to be rather strong to sufficiently suppress the granulation signal. Presently suggested updates on the fundamental stellar parameters do not improve the correspondence; however, an ad-hoc increase of the HD49933 surface gravity by about 0.2dex would eliminate most of the discrepancy. We diagnose a puzzling discrepancy between the predicted and observed granulation background in HD49933, with only rather ad-hoc ideas for remedies at hand.