Measuring stellar surface rotation and activity with the PLATO mission -- I. Strategy and application to simulated light curves

TL;DR

This paper outlines the strategy and demonstrates the effectiveness of algorithms for measuring stellar surface rotation and activity from simulated PLATO mission data, showing promising results for early data releases.

Contribution

It introduces a new pipeline strategy for analyzing PLATO data to measure stellar rotation and activity, validated on simulated light curves including realistic noise and systematics.

Findings

Surface rotation periods can be reliably recovered within six months.

Longer observations improve the accuracy of rotation and activity cycle measurements.

PLATO will provide a large, high-quality dataset for stellar activity studies.

Abstract

The Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars mission (PLATO) will allow us to measure surface rotation and monitor photometric activity of tens of thousands of main sequence solar-type and subgiant stars. This paper is the first of a series dedicated to the preparation of the analysis of stellar surface rotation and photospheric activity with the near-future PLATO data. We describe in this work the strategy that will be implemented in the PLATO pipeline to measure stellar surface rotation, photometric activity, and long-term modulations. The algorithms are applied on both noise-free and noisy simulations of solar-type stars, which include activity cycles, latitudinal differential rotation, and spot evolution. PLATO simulated systematics are included in the noisy light curves. We show that surface rotation periods can be recovered with confidence for most of the stars with only six months of observations and that the {recovery rate} of the analysis significantly improves as additional observations are collected. This means that the first PLATO data release will already provide a substantial set of measurements for this quantity, with a significant refinement on their quality as the instrument obtains longer light curves. Measuring the Schwabe-like magnetic activity cycle during the mission will require that the same field be observed over a significant timescale (more than four years). Nevertheless, PLATO will provide a vast and robust sample of solar-type stars with constraints on the activity-cycle length. Such a sample is lacking from previous missions dedicated to space photometry.