Photospheric and coronal abundances in solar-type stars: the peculiar case of τ Bootis

¹ INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, Piazza del Parlamento 1, 90134 Palermo, Italy
e-mail: maggio@astropa.inaf.it; scelsi@astropa.inaf.it
² Centro de Astrobiología, CSIC-INTA, European Space Astronomy Center, PO Box 78, 28691 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain
e-mail: jsanz@cab.inta-csic.es

Received: 14 August 2010
Accepted: 29 November 2010

Abstract

Aims. Chemical abundances in solar-type stars are still a much debated topic in many respects. In particular, planet-hosting stars are known to be metal-rich, but whether or not this peculiarity applies also to the chemical composition of the outer stellar atmospheres is still to be clarified. More in general, coronal and photospheric abundances in late-type stars appear to be different in many cases, but understanding how chemical stratification effects work in stellar atmospheres requires an observational base larger than currently available.

Methods. We obtained XMM-Newton high-resolution X-ray spectra of τ Bootis, a well known nearby star with a Jovian-mass close-in planet. We analyzed these data with the aim to perform a detailed line-based emission measure analysis and derive the abundances of individual elements in the corona with two different methods applied independently. We compared the coronal abundances of τ Bootis with published photospheric abundances based on high-resolution optical spectra and with those of other late-type stars with different magnetic activity levels, including the Sun.

Results. We find that the two methods provide consistent results within the statistical uncertainties for both the emission measure distribution of the hot plasma and for the coronal abundances, with discrepancies at the 2σ level limited to the amount of plasma at temperatures of 3–4 MK and to the O and Ni abundances. In both cases, the elements for which both coronal and photospheric measurements are available (C, N, O, Si, Fe, and Ni) result systematically less abundant in the corona by a factor 3 or more, with the exception of the coronal Ni abundance which is similar to the photospheric value. Comparison with other late-type stars of similar activity level shows that these coronal/photospheric abundance ratios are peculiar to τ Bootis and possibly related to the characteristic over-metallicity of this planet-hosting star.