Surface image and activity-corrected orbit of the RS CVn binary HR 7275: Disentangling activity tracers

TL;DR

This study disentangles the spectra of the HR 7275 binary system to analyze stellar activity, improve orbital parameters, and map surface features, revealing complex magnetic fields and significant spot coverage on the primary star.

Contribution

We developed a method to separate component spectra in a binary system, enabling detailed magnetic and surface activity analysis, and refined the orbital solution by removing activity-induced radial velocity jitter.

Findings

Primary star has large cool spots covering ~40% of its surface.

Removing activity jitter improved orbital parameter accuracy by a factor of ten.

Detected phase-dependent magnetic fields indicating complex magnetic morphology.

Abstract

Quantifying stellar parameters and magnetic activity for cool stars in double-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB2) is not straightforward, as both stars contribute to the observed composite spectra and are likely variable. Disentangled component spectra allow a detailed analysis of a component's magnetic activity. We aim at separating the spectra of the two stellar components of the HR\,7275 SB2 system. Our further aim is a more accurate orbital solution by cleaning the observed radial velocities (RV) from activity perturbations of the spotted primary ("RV jitter") and obtain a surface image of this component. The Doppler image of the primary shows two large cool spots of size $\approx$20\% of the visible hemisphere plus three smaller spots, each still $\approx$13\% in size. In total, HR\,7275a exhibited an impressive spottedness of $\approx$40\%\ of its entire surface in May-June 2022. The RV is modulated by the rotation of the primary with maximum amplitudes of 320\,\ms\ and 650\,\ms\ for two different modulation behaviors during the 250\,d of our observations. This jitter is primarily caused by the varying asymmetries of the apparent disk brightness due to the cool spots. Its removal resulted in roughly ten times higher precision of the orbital elements. Our snapshot magnetic-field measurements reveal phase-dependent (large-scale) surface fields between +0.6$\pm$2.0\,G at phase 0.1 and $-$15.2$\pm$2.7\,G at phase 0.6, indicating a complex magnetic morphology related to the location of the photospheric spots. We also obtain a logarithmic lithium abundance of 0.58$\pm$0.1 for HR\,7275a, indicating considerable mixing, and 0.16$^{+0.23}_{-0.63}$ for HR\,7275b, which is an extremely low value. }