Issue |
A&A
Volume 566, June 2014
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A66 | |
Number of page(s) | 18 | |
Section | Stellar atmospheres | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201322697 | |
Published online | 17 June 2014 |
On the long-term correlation between the flux in the Ca ii H & K and Hα lines for FGK stars⋆
1 Centro de Astrofísica, Universidade do Porto, Rua das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto, Portugal
e-mail: Joao.Silva@astro.up.pt
2 Departamento de Física e Astronomia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
3 Observatoire de Genève, Université de Genève, 51 ch. des Maillettes, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland
Received: 17 September 2013
Accepted: 21 November 2013
The re-emission in the cores of the Ca ii H & K and Hα lines are well known proxies of stellar activity. However, these activity indices probe different activity phenomena: the first is more sensitive to plage variation, while the other is more sensitive to filaments. In this paper, we study the long-term correlation between log R'HK and log IHα, two indices based on the Ca ii H & K and Hα lines, respectively, for a sample of 271 FGK stars using measurements obtained over a ~9 year time span. Because stellar activity is one of the main obstacles to the detection of low-mass and long-period planets, understanding this activity index correlation further can give us some hints about the optimal target to focus on ways to correct for these activity effects. We found a great variety of long-term correlations between log R'HK. Around 20% of our sample has a strong positive correlation between the indices while about 3% show strong negative correlation. These fractions are compatible with those found for the case of early-M dwarfs. Stars exhibiting a positive correlation have a tendency to be more active when compared to the median of the sample, while stars showing a negative correlation are more present among higher metallicity stars. There is also a tendency for the positively correlated stars to be more present among the coolest stars, a result which is probably due to the activity level effect on the correlation. Activity level and metallicity therefore seem to be playing a role on the correlation between log R'HK and log IHα. Possible explanations based on the influence of filaments for the diversity in the correlations between these indices are discussed in this paper. As a parallel result, we show a way to estimate the effective temperature of FGK dwarfs that exhibit a low activity level by using the Hα index.
Key words: stars: activity / stars: chromospheres / stars: solar-type / planetary systems
Appendices are available in electronic form at http://www.aanda.org
© ESO, 2014
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.