Stellar activity with LAMOST. I. Spot configuration in Pleiades

TL;DR

This study uses LAMOST spectra to analyze starspot coverage and activity in Pleiades stars, revealing correlations with rotation and providing insights into stellar dynamo mechanisms in young, cool stars.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate starspot coverage from TiO band analysis and presents new findings on the relationship between starspots, rotation, and activity in young stars.

Findings

Large starspot coverage (~50%) in many K- and M-type Pleiades stars.

Spot coverage increases with decreasing Rossby number, saturating at 40-50%.

Starspot distribution varies with rotation speed, with more symmetrical spots in fast rotators.

Abstract

We use the spectra of Pleiades and field stars from LAMOST DR2 archive to study how spottedness and activity vary as a function of mass at young ages. We obtained standard TiO band strength by measuring TiO bands near 7050 $\AA$ from LAMOST spectra (R$\approx$1800) for large sample of field GKM dwarfs with solar metallicity. Analysis show that active dwarfs, including late G- and early K-type, have extra TiO absorption compare to inactive counterparts, indicating the presence of cool spots on their surface. Active late K- and M-dwarfs show deeper TiO2 and shallower TiO4 compare to inactive stars at a given TiO5, which could be partly explained through cool spots. We estimated cool spot fractional coverage for 304 Pleiades candidates by modelling their TiO2 (&TiO5) band strength with respect to standard value. Results show that surface of large fraction of K- and M-type members have very large spot coverage ($\sim$50%). We analysed a correlation between spot coverage, rotation and the amplitude of light variation, and found spot coverage on slow rotators ($R_{o}$ > 0.1) increases with decreasing Rossby Number $R_{o}$. Interestingly, we detected a saturation-like feature for spot coverage in fast rotators with a saturation level of 40%-50%. In addition, spot distribution in hotter fast rotators show more symmetrical compare to slow rotators. More interestingly, we detected large spot coverage in many M type members with no or little light variation. In bigger picture, these results provide important constraints for stellar dynamo on these cool active stars.