Signature of a magnetic activity cycle in HD49933 observed by CoRoT

Abstract

Solar-like stars with an external convective envelope can develop magnetic activity cycles under the interaction of con- vection, rotation and magnetic fields. Even in the Sun, these dynamo effects are not yet well understood and it would be extremely important to extend this study to different stars with different characteristics. HD49933 is a F5V, 1.2 solar mass star that has been observed by CoRoT for 60 days during the initial Run and 137 more days about 6 months later. Thus, a total of 400 days have been covered with the two observations. Assuming that the activity cycle is proportional to the rotation of the star (which spins 8-9 times faster than the Sun, i.e., P_rot=3.4 days), CoRoT observations could be good to perform such study. The analysis techniques employed here hve already been successfully tested on sun-as-a-star observations done by VIRGO and GOLF on board SoHO and ground-based MARK-I instrument.