Stellar activity with LAMOST - II. Chromospheric activity in open clusters

TL;DR

This study analyzes chromospheric activity in open cluster stars using LAMOST spectra, revealing activity sequences, saturation behaviors, and correlations with rotation and spectral type across different stellar masses and ages.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how chromospheric activity varies with rotation, mass, and age, and compares chromospheric and coronal activity dependencies.

Findings

Two activity sequences in cool stars parallel rotation sequences.

Chromospheric emission saturates at larger Rossby numbers than coronal emission.

Fully convective slow rotators follow the same activity-rotation relation as hotter stars.

Abstract

We use the LAMOST spectra of member stars in Pleiades, M34, Praesepe, and Hyades to study how chromospheric activity vary as a function of mass and rotation at different age. We measured excess equivalent widths of H$\alpha$, H$\beta$, and Ca~{\sc ii} K based on estimated chromospheric contributions from old and inactive field dwarfs, and excess luminosities are obtained by normalizing bolometric luminosity, for more than 700 late-type stars in these open clusters. Results indicate two activity sequences in cool spot coverage and H$\alpha$ excess emission among GK dwarfs in Pleiades and M dwarfs in Praesepe and Hyades, paralleling with well known rotation sequences. A weak dependence of chromospheric emission on rotation exists among ultra fast rotators in saturated regime with Rossby number Ro$\lesssim0.1$. In the unsaturated regime, chromospheric and coronal emission show similar dependence on Ro, but with a shift toward larger Ro, indicating chromospheric emission gets easily saturated than coronal emission, and/or convective turnover time-scales based on X-ray data do not work well with chromospheric emission. More interestingly, our analysis show fully convective slow rotators obey the rotation-chromospheric activity relation similar to hotter stars, confirming the previous finding. We found correlations among H$\alpha$, H$\beta$, and Ca~{\sc ii} K emissions, in which H$\alpha$ losses are more important than Ca~{\sc ii} K for cooler and more active stars. In addition, a weak correlation is seen between chromospheric emission and photospheric activity that shows dependency on stellar spectral type and activity level, which provides some clues on how spot configuration vary as a function of mass and activity level.