Title: Rotation and Spots and Activity, Oh My!: Understanding Stars with TESS,Pandora, and Beyond
Abstract:
We are in a golden age of exoplanet and stellar astronomy, with better techniques and instrumentation than ever. However, as our ability to detect and characterize low amplitude exoplanets has grown, stellar activity has remained a difficult challenge. Fortunately, wide-field photometric surveys such as Kepler and TESS give us a powerful new tool to understand and mitigate the variable behavior in stars, and dedicated upcoming missions like Pandora will study spots and inhomogeneities on the stellar surface. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of recovering rotation periods from the TESS data set and my own work developing SpinSpotter, an open source package that uses autocorrelation analysis to identify fast rotating main sequence stars from TESS light curves. Stellar rotation is a powerful tool for understanding stars, as it correlates with age and therefore can offer insight into the history and evolution of individual systems and stellar populations. I will also introduce the TESS Rotation Collaboration, which is an in-progress effort between scientists from over a dozen institutions to perform a comparative analysis of various
rotation-finding methods on simulated TESS data. The results of this collaboration will help us understand the effectiveness of various methods in different regions of parameter space, and illuminate what challenges still remain when studying stellar rotation with current technology. Finally, I will introduce Pandora, an upcoming SmallSat launching in late 2025, that will perform atmospheric transmission spectroscopy and map the stellar surfaces of bright nearby M dwarf systems. Equipped with a near-IR spectrograph and a visible wavelength photometer, Pandora will enable in depth studies of spots and other stellar surface inhomogeneities, advancing our efforts to disentangle the impact of stellar activity on planetary atmospheric signatures.
Speaker:
Rae Holcomb (UC Irvine)
