Rotation and differential rotation of active Kepler stars

TL;DR

This study analyzes rotation and differential rotation in thousands of active Kepler stars, revealing how surface shear varies with rotation period and temperature, and providing new empirical data on stellar surface shear.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale measurement of surface differential rotation in over 18,000 stars, advancing understanding of stellar rotation dynamics.

Findings

Relative shear increases with rotation period.

Absolute shear slightly increases with effective temperature.

Differential rotation measurements align with mean-field theory predictions.

Abstract

We present rotation periods for thousands of active stars in the Kepler field derived from Q3 data. In most cases a second period close to the rotation period was detected, which we interpreted as surface differential rotation (DR). Active stars were selected from the whole sample using the range of the variability amplitude. To detect different periods in the light curves we used the Lomb-Scargle periodogram in a pre-whitening approach to achieve parameters for a global sine fit. The most dominant periods from the fit were ascribed to different surface rotation periods, but spot evolution could also play a role. Due to the large number of stars the period errors were estimated in a statistical way. We thus cannot exclude the existence of false positives among our periods. In our sample of 40.661 active stars we found 24.124 rotation periods $P_1$ between 0.5-45 days. The distribution of stars with 0.5 < B-V < 1.0 and ages derived from angular momentum evolution that are younger than 300 Myr is consistent with a constant star-formation rate. A second period $P_2$ within $\pm30$% of the rotation period $P_1$ was found in 18.619 stars (77.2%). Attributing these two periods to DR we found that the relative shear $\alpha=\Delta\Omega/\Omega$ increases with rotation period, and slightly decreases with effective temperature. The absolute shear $\Delta\Omega$ slightly increases between $T_{eff}=3500-6000$ K. Above 6000 K $\Delta\Omega$ shows much larger scatter. We found weak dependence of $\Delta\Omega$ on rotation period. Latitudinal differential rotation measured for the first time in more than 18.000 stars provides a comprehensive picture of stellar surface shear, consistent with major predictions from mean-field theory. To what extent our observations are prone to false positives and selection bias is not fully explored, and needs to be addressed using more Kepler data.