Modelling stellar coronae from surface magnetograms: the role of missing magnetic flux

TL;DR

This study investigates how missing magnetic flux data from stellar surface magnetograms affects the accuracy of modeled stellar coronal magnetic fields, revealing that missing out-of-view regions significantly alter the extrapolated field structures.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes the impact of missing surface magnetic information on coronal field extrapolations using simulated data, highlighting the effects of starspots, limited view, and resolution.

Findings

Missing out-of-view regions significantly alter magnetic field extrapolations.

Coronal structures in the visible hemisphere are reliably reproduced.

Open flux estimates are often overestimated when flux is missing.

Abstract

Recent advances in spectropolarimetry have allowed the reconstruction of stellar coronal magnetic fields. This uses Zeeman-Doppler magnetograms of the surface magnetic field as a lower boundary condition. The ZDI maps, however, suffer from the absence of information about the magnetic field over regions of the surface due to the presence of dark starspots and portions of the surface out of view due to a tilt in the rotation axis. They also suffer from finite resolution which leads to small scale field structures being neglected. This paper explores the effects of this loss of information on the extrapolated coronal fields. For this we use simulated stellar surface magnetic maps for two hypothetical stars. Using the potential field approximation, the coronal fields and emission measures are calculated. This is repeated for the cases of missing information due to, (i) starspots, (ii) a large area of the stellar surface out of view, (iii) a finite resolution. The largest effect on the magnetic field structure arises when a significant portion of the stellar surface remains out of view. This changes the nature of the field lines that connect to this obscured hemisphere. Nonetheless, the field structure in the visible hemisphere is reliably reproduced. Thus the calculation of the locations and surface filling factors of accretion funnels is reasonably well reproduced for the observed hemisphere. The decrease with height of the magnetic pressure, which is important in calculating disc truncation radii for accreting stars, is also largely unaffected in the equatorial plane. The fraction of surface flux that is open and therefore able to supply angular momentum loss in a wind, however, is often overestimated in the presence of missing flux.