Hot stars are plagued by giant magnetic spots

Astronomers using European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes have discovered giant spots on the surface of extremely hot stars hidden in stellar clusters. Not only are these stars plagued by magnetic spots, some also experience superflare events, explosions of energy several million times more energetic than similar eruptions on the Sun. The findings will help astronomers better understand these puzzling stars and open doors to resolving other elusive mysteries of stellar astronomy.

The team, led by Yazan Momany from the INAF Astronomical Observatory of Padua in Italy, looked at a particular type of star known as extreme horizontal branch stars — objects with about half the mass of the Sun but four to five times hotter.

“These hot and small stars are special because we know they will bypass one of the final phases in the life of a typical star and will die prematurely,” says Momany, who was previously a staff astronomer at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. “In our Galaxy, these peculiar hot objects are generally associated with the presence of a close companion star.”

Surprisingly, however, the vast majority of these extreme horizontal branch stars, when observed in tightly packed stellar groups called globular clusters, do not appear to have companions. The team’s long-term monitoring of these stars, made with ESO telescopes, also revealed that there was something more to these mysterious objects. When looking at three different globular clusters, Momany and his colleagues found that many of the extreme horizontal branch stars within them showed regular changes in their brightness over the course of just a few days to several weeks.

“After eliminating all other scenarios, there was only one remaining possibility to explain their observed brightness variations,” concludes Simone Zaggia, a study co-author from the INAF Astronomical Observatory of Padua in Italy: “these stars must be plagued by spots!” 

Spots on extreme horizontal branch stars appear to be quite different from the dark sunspots on our own Sun, but both are caused by magnetic fields. The spots on these hot, extreme stars are brighter and hotter than the surrounding stellar surface, unlike on the Sun where we see spots as dark stains on the solar surface that are cooler than their surroundings. The spots on extreme horizontal branch stars are also significantly larger than sunspots, covering up to a quarter of the star’s surface. These spots are incredibly persistent, lasting for decades, while individual sunspots are temporary, lasting only a few days to months. As the hot stars rotate, the spots on the surface come and go, causing the visible changes in brightness.

The team also discovered a couple of extreme horizontal branch stars that showed superflares — sudden explosions of energy and another signpost of the presence of a magnetic field.

Gavin Ramsay from Armagh Observatory and Planetarium comments, “this is a very interesting study of stars which are members of globular clusters — dense groups of old stars which orbit the Milky Way — which appear to show different characteristics to very similar stars which are orbiting the Milky Way but not in clusters. It is quite odd!  These `odd’ stars seem to show very large star spots which would indicate the presence of magnetic fields, something  which has not really been seen in their Milky Ways cousins. It may have important implications for how magnetic fields change over the lifetime of stars and how flares are generated from stars in general.”

After six decades of trying to understand extreme horizontal branch stars, astronomers now have a more complete picture of them. Moreover, this finding could help explain the origin of strong magnetic fields in many white dwarfs, objects that represent the final stage in the life of Sun-like stars and show similarities to extreme horizontal branch stars.