Published April 1, 2026 | Version v1
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Do stars smile back at us? Calculating photocenter shifts for fictional spot configurations based on stellar personalities

  • 1. HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences

Description

Light decrement caused by stellar spots can have a significant effect on our observations of distant stars, since it causes the photocenter of the point source to shift. The degree of these photocenter shifts highly depends on the configuration of the dark starspots. Starpots appear where magnetic flux tubes pierce through the photosphere and throught the interaction of plasma and magnetic field, suppress convective energy transport. However, other factors might have an impact on the final positions. One of the factors we looked into are personalities and possible emotions of the stars. In this work, we created fictional surface temperature maps of starspot configurations corresponding to different personalities, beliefs and emotional ranges a star might have. We calculated the photocenter shifts of these maps to see how this anthropomorphic approach fits to observation.

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