Speaker
Jyri Lehtinen
(University of Helsinki)
Description
One popular method for detecting and quantifying surface differential rotation of
active stars has been to monitor how the periods of their observed light curves fluctuate
over time. The observed period fluctuations should indicate major spotted areas situated at
different latitudes that have different rotation periods. The period determination of the light
curves becomes, however, increasingly unstable for lower light curve amplitudes and sparser
data and can lead to spurious period fluctuation of tens of percents. I will present an analysis of
how accurately one can use the detected period fluctuations as a measure of the actual surface
differential rotation.
Primary author
Jyri Lehtinen
(University of Helsinki)
