Spectral variability of photospheric radiation due to faculae – II. Facular contrasts for cool main-sequence stars

Abstract

ABSTRACT Magnetic features on the surface of stars, such as spots and faculae, cause stellar spectral variability on time-scales of days and longer. For stars other than the Sun, the spectral signatures of faculae are poorly understood, limiting our ability to account for stellar pollution in exoplanet transit observations. Here we present the first facular contrasts derived from magnetoconvection simulations for K0, M0, and M2 main-sequence stars and compare them to previous calculations for G2 main-sequence stars. We simulate photospheres and immediate subsurface layers of main-sequence spectral types between K0 and M2, with different injected vertical magnetic fields (0 G, 100 G, 300 G, and 500 G) using MURaM, a 3D radiation-magnetohydrodynamics code. We show synthetic spectra and contrasts from the UV (300 nm) to the IR (10 000 nm) calculated using the ATLAS9 radiative transfer code. The calculations are performed for nine viewing angles to characterize the facular radiation across the disc. The brightness contrasts of magnetic regions are found to change significantly across spectral type, wavelength, and magnetic field strength, leading to the conclusion that accurate contrasts cannot be found by scaling solar values. This is due to features of different size, apparent structure and spectral brightness emerging in the presence of a given magnetic field for different spectral types.