Disentangling Stellar and Airglow Emission Lines from HST-COS Spectra

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to subtract geocoronal airglow contamination from HST-COS FUV spectra to recover stellar emission lines, enabling better analysis of stellar chromospheres.

Contribution

The study develops stable airglow templates and a GUI for airglow subtraction, improving the recovery of stellar Lyα and O I emissions from contaminated spectra.

Findings

Airglow templates are stable and effective for subtraction.

Successful Lyα recovery requires a minimum flux of 1.39×10⁻¹⁴ erg cm⁻² s⁻¹.

A predictor based on Si III SNR estimates subtraction success.

Abstract

H I Ly$\alpha$ (1215.67 \r{A}) and the O I triplet (1302.17, 1304.86, and 1306.03 \r{A}) are bright far-ultraviolet (FUV) emission lines that trace the stellar chromosphere. Observations of stellar Ly$\alpha$ and O I using the Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) most sensitive FUV spectrograph, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), are contaminated with geocoronal emission, or airglow. This study demonstrates that airglow emission profiles as observed by COS are sufficiently stable to create airglow templates which can be reliably subtracted from the data, recovering the underlying stellar flux. We developed a graphical user interface to implement the airglow subtraction on a sample of 171 main sequence F, G, K, and M-type dwarfs from the COS data archive. Correlations between recovered stellar emission and measures of stellar activity were investigated. Several power law relationships are presented for predicting the stellar Ly$\alpha$ and O I emission. The apparent brightness of the stellar emission relative to the airglow is a critical factor in the success or failure of an airglow subtraction. We developed a predictor for the success of an airglow subtraction using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the nearby chromospheric emission line Si III (1206.51 \r{A}). The minimum attenuated Ly$\alpha$ flux which was successfully recovered is 1.39$\times$10$^{-14}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$, and we recommend this as a minimum flux for COS Ly$\alpha$ recoveries.