Katja Poppenhaeger

My group recently collaborated with the solar physics group and in particular Dr. Andrea Dierke for an investigation of solar H alpha emission. The paper is now published!

Solar H alpha excess during Solar Cycle 24 from full-disk filtergrams of the Chromospheric Telescope

Diercke, A.; Kuckein, C.; Cauley, P. W.; Poppenhäger, K.; Alvarado-Gómez, J. D.; Dineva, E.; Denker, C.

The chromospheric H-alpha spectral line is a strong line in the spectrum of the Sun and other stars. In the stellar regime, this spectral line is already used as a powerful tracer of stellar activity. For the Sun, other tracers (i.e, CaII K) are typically used to monitor solar activity. We used observations of full-disk H-alpha filtergrams of the Chromospheric Telescope (ChroTel) to extract the imaging H-alpha excess and deficit, which are related to bright features (plage regions) and dark absorption features (filaments and sunspots), respectively. The aim of this study is to introduce the imaging H-alpha excess and deficit as tracers of solar activity and compare them to other established indicators: the relative sunspot number, the F10.7cm radio flux, and the MgII index. The H-alpha excess and deficit follow the behavior of the solar activity over the course of the cycle, whereby the peak of the H-alpha deficit is shortly after the solar maximum. The H-alpha excess is closely correlated to the chromospheric MgII index. The highest correlation of the H-alpha deficit is found with the F10.7cm radio flux. The H-alpha deficit reflects the cyclic behavior of polar crown filaments and their disappearance shortly before the solar maximum. We investigated the mean intensity distribution for H-alpha excess regions for solar minimum and maximum, whereby the shape of the distributions is very similar, but with different amplitudes. Furthermore, we investigate whether the area coverage fraction or the changing H-alpha excess in the active regions dominates temporal variability in solar H-alpha observations. The area coverage fraction and the H-alpha excess are strongly correlated, whereas the weak correlation between the area coverage fraction and mean intensity leaves us pessimistic that the degeneracy between these two quantities can be broken for the modeling of unresolved stellar surfaces.

eprint arXiv:2203.04357, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, March 2022

During the first Covid lockdown I started what I call my little pandemic project. But then all the real-life consequences of living through a worldwide pandemic set in, and it took until early this year to wrap up my project. It is finally done! And it is the first single-author paper I have ever written.

Here’s some information on the paper:

Helium absorption in exoplanet atmospheres is connected to stellar coronal abundances
Poppenhaeger, K.

Transit observations in the helium triplet around 10 830 Angstrom are a successful tool to study exoplanetary atmospheres and their mass loss. Forming those lines requires ionization and recombination of helium in the exoplanetary atmosphere. This ionization is caused by stellar photons at extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths; however, no currently active telescopes can observe this part of the stellar spectrum. The relevant part of the stellar EUV spectrum consists of individual emission lines, many of them being formed by iron at coronal temperatures. The stellar iron abundance in the corona is often observed to be depleted for high-activity low-mass stars due to the first ionization potential (FIP) effect. I show that stars with high versus low coronal iron abundances follow different scaling laws that tie together their X-ray emission and the narrow-band EUV flux that causes helium ionization. I also show that the stellar iron to oxygen abundance ratio in the corona can be measured reasonably well from X-ray CCD spectra, yielding similar results to high-resolution X-ray observations. Taking coronal iron abundance into account, the currently observed large scatter in the relationship of EUV irradiation with exoplanetary helium transit depths can be reduced, improving the target selection criteria for exoplanet transmission spectroscopy. In particular, previously puzzling non-detections of helium for Neptunic exoplanets are now in line with expectations from the revised scaling laws.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 512, Issue 2, pp.1751-1764, May 2022

My PhD student Ekaterina Ilin investigates stellar flares in various space-based observations, and has developed a flare-finding code names AltaiPony already a while ago. We used this in several of her papers, for example for the flare census in open clusters (Ilin et al. 2019, Ilin et al. 2021) and the high latitude flares on M dwarfs (Ilin et al. 2021, blog post). After having it available on github already for a good while, Ekaterina has now also published her code in the peer-reviewed Journal for Open Source Software and it is linked in the Astrophysical Source Code Library. It is pip-installable and a very useful tool!

AltaiPony: Flare finder for Kepler, K2, and TESS light curves

github – JOSS – ASCL

Ilin, Ekaterina; Schmidt, Sarah J.; Poppenhäger, Katja; Davenport, James R. A.; Kristiansen, Martti H.; Omohundro, Mark

AltaiPony de-trend light curves from Kepler, K2, and TESS missions, and searches them for flares. The code also injects and recovers synthetic flares to account for de-trending and noise loss in flare energy and determines energy-dependent recovery probability for every flare candidate. AltaiPony uses K2SC (ascl:1605.012), AstroPy (ascl:1304.002) and lightkurve (ascl:1812.013) in addition to other common codes, and extensive documentation and tutorials are provided for the software.

Astrophysics Source Code Library, record ascl:2201.009, January 2022

My PhD student Ekaterina Ilin has discovered a new method to localize flares on fast-rotating stars, using the rotational modulation of flares that last longer than the stellar rotation. With her new method she found that flares

on fast-rotating M dwarfs occur close to the poles of the star, instead of neat to the equator like on our own Sun. This could be good news for exoplanets and their habitability, because particles expelled by the star during flares may miss the planets and harm their atmospheres less.

The AIP published a press release about Ekaterina’s paper.

Giant white-light flares on fully convective stars occur at high latitudes

Ilin, Ekaterina; Poppenhaeger, Katja; Schmidt, Sarah J.; Järvinen, Silva P.; Newton, Elisabeth R.; Alvarado-Gómez, Julián D.; Pineda, J. Sebastian; Davenport, James R. A.; Oshagh, Mahmoudreza; Ilyin, Ilya

White-light flares are magnetically driven localized brightenings on the surfaces of stars. Their temporal, spectral, and statistical properties present a treasury of physical information about stellar magnetic fields. The spatial distributions of magnetic spots and associated flaring regions help constrain dynamo theories. Moreover, flares are thought to crucially affect the habitability of exoplanets that orbit these stars. Measuring the location of flares on stars other than the Sun is challenging due to the lack of spatial resolution. Here we present four fully convective stars observed with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite that displayed large, long-duration flares in white-light which were modulated in brightness by the stars’ fast rotation. This allowed us to determine the loci of these flares directly from the light curves. All four flares occurred at latitudes between 55° and 81°, far higher than typical solar flare latitudes. Our findings are evidence that strong magnetic fields tend to emerge close to the stellar rotational poles for fully convective stars, and suggest that the impact of flares on the habitability of exoplanets around small stars could be weaker than previously thought.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 507, Issue 2, pp.1723-1745 (2021)

Our group’s first paper using data from the German-Russian eROSITA mission has been accepted for publication. My PhD student Grace Foster has investigated the X-ray irradiation and estimated the evaporation of exoplanets using data from eROSITA’s first and second all-sky scan.

The paper is available here:

Exoplanet X-ray irradiation and evaporation rates with eROSITA

Foster, G. ; Poppenhaeger, K. ; Ilic, N. ; Schwope, A.

High-energy irradiation is a driver for atmospheric evaporation and mass loss in exoplanets. This work is based on data from eROSITA, the soft X-ray instrument aboard SRG (Spectrum Roentgen Gamma) mission, as well as archival data from other missions, we aim to characterise the high-energy environment of known exoplanets and estimate their mass loss rates. We use X-ray source catalogues from eROSITA, XMM-Newton, Chandra and ROSAT to derive X-ray luminosities of exoplanet host stars in the 0.2-2 keV energy band with an underlying coronal, i.e. optically thin thermal spectrum. We present a catalogue of stellar X-ray and EUV luminosities, exoplanetary X-ray and EUV irradiation fluxes and estimated mass loss rates for a total of 287 exoplanets, 96 among them being characterised for the first time from new eROSITA detections. We identify 14 first time X-ray detections of transiting exoplanets that are subject to irradiation levels known to cause observable evaporation signatures in other exoplanets, which makes them suitable targets for follow-up observations.

eprint arXiv:2106.14550, accepted by A&A (2021)

In a recent work by Prof. Carolina von Essen, with large contributions from our group from the side of Dr. Matthias Mallonn (and minor contributions from myself), we investigate the TESS phase curve and the dayside temperature of KELT-1b, which is a bit too heavy to still be called a planet and is therefore classified as a low-mass brown dwarf.

From the abstract:

We present the detection and analysis of the phase curve of KELT-1b at optical wavelengths, analyzing data taken by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) during cycle 2 and sector 17. With a mass of ~27 MJup, KELT-1b is an example of a low-mass brown dwarf. Due to the high mass and close proximity of its companion, the host star exhibits a TESS light curve that shows clear ellipsoidal variations. We modeled the data with a six-component model: secondary eclipse, phase curve accounting for reflected light and thermal emission, Doppler beaming, ellipsoidal variations, stellar activity, and the primary transit. We determined the secondary eclipse depth in the TESS bandpass to be 304 ± 75 parts-per-million (ppm). In addition, we measured the amplitude of the phase curve to be 128 ± 27 ppm, with a corresponding eastward offset between the region of maximum brightness and the substellar point of 19.2 ± 9.6 degrees, with the latter showing good agreement with Spitzer measurements. We determined a day-side brightness temperature in the TESS bandpass of 3201 ± 147 K that is approximately 200 K higher than the values determined from the Spitzer 3.6 and 4.5 μm data. By combining TESS and Spitzer eclipse depths, we derived a day-side effective temperature of Teff = 3010 ± 78 K. Previously published eclipse depths in the near-infrared suggest a much higher brightness temperature and this discrepancy cannot be explained by spectral models combined with the current data. We attribute those large eclipse depths to unmodeled ellipsoidal variations, which would typically be manifested as a deeper secondary eclipse in observations with insufficient phase coverage. A one-dimensional self-consistent atmospheric model is able to explain the TESS and Spitzer day-side brightness temperatures with thermal emission alone and no reflected light. The difference between the TESS and Spitzer brightness temperatures can be explained via CO absorption due to a non-inverted temperature profile. The night side data fix an upper limit of ~2000 K on the internal temperature of KELT-1 b.

“TESS unveils the optical phase curve of KELT-1b. Thermal emission and ellipsoidal variation from the brown dwarf companion along with the stellar activity”, von Essen, C.; Mallonn, M.; Piette, A.; Cowan, N. B.; Madhusudhan, N.; Agol, E.; Antoci, V.; Poppenhaeger, K.; Stassun, K. G.; Khalafinejad, S.; Tautvaišienė, G., Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 648, id.A71, 19 pp., April 2021.