Using planetary transits to estimate magnetic cycles lengths in Kepler stars

TL;DR

This study uses planetary transits observed by Kepler to estimate magnetic cycle lengths in solar-type stars, revealing deviations from previous models and highlighting the complexity of stellar magnetic activity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to estimate stellar magnetic activity cycles from transit residuals and analyzes their relation to rotation periods, challenging existing active/inactive star classifications.

Findings

Some active stars do not follow the expected cycle-rotation relation.

Detected short magnetic cycles in 6 Kepler stars.

Observed a spread in activity behavior compared to literature data.

Abstract

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.