New Suns in the Cosmos II: Differential rotation in Kepler Sun-like stars

Abstract

The present study reports the discovery of Sun-like stars, namely main-sequence stars with $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $\log g$ and rotation periods $P_{rot}$ similar to solar values, presenting evidence of surface differential rotation. An autocorrelation of the time series was used to select stars presenting photometric signal stability from a sample of 881 stars with light curves collected by the $Kepler$ space-borne telescope, in which we have identified 17 stars with stable signals. A simple two-spot model together with a Bayesian information criterion were applied to these stars in the search for indications of differential rotation; in addition, for all 17 stars, it was possible to compute the spot rotation period $P$, the mean values of the individual spot rotation periods and their respective colatitudes, and the relative amplitude of the differential rotation.

9 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication on MNRAS

References in corpus (5)

• Measuring the rotation period distribution of field M-dwarfs with Kepler
• Simulations of dynamo action in fully convective stars
• Testing the recovery of stellar rotation signals from Kepler light curves using a blind hare-and-hounds exercise
• Antisolar differential rotation of the K1-giant sigma Geminorum revisited
• The differential rotation of epsilon Eri from MOST data

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Activity time series of old stars from late F to early K. I. Simulating radial velocity, astrometry, photometry, and chromospheric emission
• A New Method for Estimating Starspot Lifetimes Based on Autocorrelation Functions
• New Suns in the Cosmos IV: the multifractal nature of stellar magnetic activity in \textit{Kepler} cool stars