From Solar to Stellar Brightness Variations: The Effect of Metallicity

TL;DR

This study extends a solar brightness variation model to Sun-like stars with different metallicities and temperatures, revealing that small parameter changes significantly impact observed stellar brightness variations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to model stellar brightness changes considering metallicity and temperature effects, highlighting their importance in understanding stellar variability.

Findings

Metallicity and temperature significantly influence brightness variations.

Brightness variation amplitude has a minimum near solar parameters.

Inclination effects diminish at higher metallicities.

Abstract

Context. Comparison studies of Sun-like stars with the Sun suggest an anomalously low photometric variability of the Sun compared to Sun-like stars with similar magnetic activity. Comprehensive understanding of stellar variability is needed, to find a physical reasoning for this observation. Aims. We investigate the effect of metallicity and effective temperature on the photometric brightness change of Sun-like stars seen at different inclinations. The considered range of fundamental stellar parameters is sufficiently small so the stars, investigated here, still count as Sun-like or even as solar twins. Methods. To model the brightness change of stars with solar magnetic activity, we extend a well established model of solar brightness variations, SATIRE (which stands for Spectral And Total Irradiance Reconstruction), which is based on solar spectra, to stars with different fundamental parameters. For that we calculate stellar spectra for different metallicities and effective temperature using the radiative transfer code ATLAS9. Results. We show that even a small change (e.g. within the observational error range) of metallicity or effective temperature significantly affects the photometric brightness change compared to the Sun. We find that for Sun-like stars, the amplitude of the brightness variations obtained for Str\"omgren (b + y)/2 reaches a local minimum for fundamental stellar parameters close to the solar metallicity and effective temperature. Moreover, our results show that the effect of inclination decreases for metallicity values greater than the solar metallicity. Overall, we find that an exact determination of fundamental stellar parameters is crucially important for understanding stellar brightness changes.