Cool Stars 14 - Submitted Abstract # 342
This version created on 05 October 2006

Preparing for Kepler:  Simulating Stellar Microvariability


Francisco Ramos-Stierle, UC Berkeley
Gibor Basri, UC Berkeley
Kurt Soto, UC Santa Barbara
Tristan Lewis, UC Berkeley
Ansgar Reiners, MPI für Sonnensystemforschung
Tom Berger, Lockheed Martin

The Kepler mission will begin to return 150,000  broad-band light
curves of main sequence G-M stars in about 3 years.  These will have
unprecedented precision, and be virtually continuous for at least 4
years.  Although their primary purpose is the detection of transits by
extrasolar terrestrial planets, this is obviously a treasure-trove of
information on stellar activity and rotation.  To prepare for this
deluge of high quality data, we are conducting a research program to
understand and simulate stellar microvariability.  We hope to learn
how to extract maximal information from the Kepler lightcurves, and to
be prepared to ingest and analyze such a large quantity of new data.
We have begun by trying to understand the Sun as a microvariable star
(see poster by Soto et al.).  Using the laws which govern continuum
variability as a function of magnetic configurations, we have begun to
produce simulated stellar data.  We demonstrate this process, and
discuss what purpose these simulations might be put to.  They include
finding rotation periods (not always easy!), understanding the
appearance of stars viewed at different inclinations (can we actually
derive inclination?), extraction of magnetic distributions in
longitude and latitude, size- and time-scales for active regions and
starspots, and the behavior of all this as a function of stellar mass
and age.  

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