A Relationship Between Stellar Age and Spot Coverage

We investigate starspot distributions consistent with space-based photometry of F, G, and K stars in six stellar associations ranging in age from 10 Myr to 4 Gyr. We show that a simple light curve statistic called the "smoothed amplitude" is proportional to stellar age as $t^{-1/2}$, following a Skumanich-like spin-down relation. We marginalize over the unknown stellar inclinations by forward modeling the ensemble of light curves for direct comparison with the Kepler, K2 and TESS photometry. We sample the posterior distributions for spot coverage with Approximate Bayesian Computation. We find typical spot coverages in the range 1-10% which decrease with increasing stellar age. The spot coverage is proportional to $t^n$ where $n =-0.37 \pm 0.16$, also statistically consistent with a Skumanich-like $t^{-1/2}$ decay of starspot coverage with age. We apply two techniques to estimate the spot coverage of young exoplanet-hosting stars likely to be targeted for transmission spectroscopy with the James Webb Space Telescope, and estimate the bias in exoplanet radius measurements due to varying starspot coverage.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, accepted in ApJ, software in review at JOSS https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/210

Hunt for Starspots in HARPS Spectra of G and K Stars

We present a method for detecting starspots on cool stars using the cross-correlation function (CCF) of high resolution molecular spectral templates applied to archival high-resolution spectra of G and K stars observed with HARPS/HARPS-N. We report non-detections of starspots on the Sun even when the Sun was spotted, the solar twin 18 Scorpii, and the very spotted Sun-like star HAT-P-11, suggesting that Sun-like starspot distributions will be invisible to the CCF technique, and should not produce molecular absorption signals which might be confused for signatures of exoplanet atmospheres. We detect strong TiO absorption in the T Tauri K-dwarfs LkCa 4 and AA Tau, consistent with significant coverage by cool regions. We show that despite the non-detections, the technique is sensitive to relatively small spot coverages on M dwarfs and large starspot areas on Sun-like stars.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, accepted to A

Non-detection of Contamination by Stellar Activity in the Spitzer Transit Light Curves of TRAPPIST-1

We apply the transit light curve self-contamination technique of Morris et al. (2018) to search for the effect of stellar activity on the transits of the ultracool dwarf TRAPPIST-1 with 2018 Spitzer photometry. The self-contamination method fits the transit light curves of planets orbiting spotted stars, allowing the host star to be a source of contaminating positive or negative flux which influences the transit depths but not the ingress/egress durations. We find that none of the planets show statistically significant evidence for self-contamination by bright or dark regions of the stellar photosphere. However, we show that small-scale magnetic activity, analogous in size to the smallest sunspots, could still be lurking in the transit photometry undetected.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ