The effect of spots on the luminosity spread of the Pleiades

TL;DR

This study models how starspots affect the brightness and luminosity spread of Pleiades stars, showing that small, randomly distributed spots can explain observed luminosity variations.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation of starspot effects on stellar brightness, reconciling photometric and spectroscopic measurements of spot coverage in young star clusters.

Findings

Small, randomly distributed spots explain the luminosity spread.

Photometric observations reveal only 10-40% of actual spot coverage.

Luminosity variation can be explained by 10% star-to-star spot coverage.

Abstract

Cool spots on the surface of magnetically-active stars modulate their observed brightnesses and temperatures, thereby affecting the stellar locus on the H-R diagram. Recent high precision space-based photometric surveys reveal the rotational modulation from spots on stars in young clusters, including K2 monitoring of the 125-Myr-old Pleiades cluster. However, lightcurves reveal only the asymmetries in the visible spot distributions rather than the total sizes of spots on stellar surfaces, which causes a discrepancy between the spot coverage measured by photometric and spectroscopic observations. In this paper, we simulate photometric variability introduced by randomly-distributed starspots on a 125-Myr-old coeval cluster. Our simulation results show that randomly distributed small spots on the stellar surface would explain this discrepancy that the photometric observations only reveal 10% to 40% of the spot coverage measured by spectra. The colors and luminosities of photospheres are modeled for a range of photospheric temperature, spot coverage, and spot temperature. The colors and luminosities of a simulated population are then compared to the luminosity spread of Pleiades members, excluding the 25% of candidates that are identified as non-members with Gaia DR2 astrometry. The observed luminosities of Pleiades members have a standard deviation of 0.05 dex, which could be entirely explained by spots with a star-to-star standard deviation of spot coverage of 10%, but with an average coverage area that is not well constrained.