Temporal Evolution of Spatially-Resolved Individual Star Spots on a Planet-Hosting Solar-type Star: Kepler 17

Star spot evolution is visible evidence of the emergence/decay of the magnetic field on stellar surface, and it is therefore important for the understanding of the underlying stellar dynamo and consequential stellar flares. In this paper, we report the temporal evolution of individual star spot area on the hot-Jupiter-hosting active solar-type star Kepler 17 whose transits occur every 1.5 days. The spot longitude and area evolution are estimated (1) from the stellar rotational modulations of Kepler data and (2) from the brightness enhancements during the exoplanet transits caused by existence of large star spots. As a result of the comparison, number of spots, spot locations, and the temporal evolution derived from the rotational modulations is largely different from those of in-transit spots. We confirm that although only two light curve minima appear per rotation, there are clearly many spots present on the star. We find that the observed differential intensity changes are sometimes consistent with the spot pattern detected by transits, but they sometimes do not match with each other. Although the temporal evolution derived from the rotational modulation differs from those of in-transit spots to a certain degree, the emergence/decay rates of in-transit spots are within an order of magnitude of those derived for sunspots as well as our previous research based only on rotational modulations. This supports a hypothesis that the emergence/decay of sunspots and extremely-large star spots on solar-type stars occur through the same underlying processes.
Comment: 37 pages, 12 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal