Effect of metallicity on the detectability of rotational periods in solar-like stars

Abstract

The accurate determination of stellar rotation periods is important for estimating stellar ages and for understanding stellar activity and evolution. While rotation periods can be determined for about thirty thousand stars in the Kepler field, there are over one hundred thousand stars, especially with low photometric variability and irregular pattern of variations, for which rotational periods are unknown. Here we investigate the effect of metallicity on the detectability of rotation periods. This is done by synthesising light curves of hypothetical stars that are identical to our Sun with the exception of the metallicity. These light curves are then used as an input to the period determination algorithms. We find that the success rate for recovering the rotation signal has a minimum close to the solar metallicity value. This can be explained by the compensation effect of facular and spot contributions. In addition, selecting solar-like stars with near-solar effective temperature and photometric variability, and with metallicity between M/H = −0.35 and M/H = 0.35 from the Kepler sample, we analyse the fraction of stars for which rotational periods have been detected as a function of metallicity. In agreement with our theoretical estimate we find a local minimum for the detection fraction close to the solar metallicity. We further report rotation periods of 87 solar-like Kepler stars for the first time.