Metallicity does not reorder line-to-line sensitivity to granulation in solar-like stars
Abstract
Stellar granulation imprints line-dependent wavelength shifts and profile variations that limit the precision of radial velocity (RV) measurements used for exoplanet detection and characterization. Understanding how the sensitivity of individual spectral lines to granulation depends on stellar parameters is therefore essential for mitigating granulation-induced RV signals. Here, we investigate the effect of metallicity using MURaM 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations of stellar granulation including a small-scale dynamo for metallicities M/H={−1.0,−0.5,0.0,0.3,0.5}. We synthesize spectra of neutral and ionized lines spanning a broad range of lower excitation potentials and transition probabilities using the MPS-ATLAS code, assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium. We quantify the sensitivity to granulation using the continuum-intensity-weighted standard deviations of the line centre-of-gravity wavelength and equivalent width, denoted by σλ and σW, respectively. Both metrics increase systematically with metallicity at disc centre owing to the combined effects of more vigorous convection and metallicity-dependent changes in the line opacity. We find that the correlation between the solar (M/H=0.0) and non-solar sensitivity metrics remains high from the disk center to the stellar limb. This indicates that the relative ordering of line sensitivities is robust against changes in viewing angle and metallicity. Consequently, line masks calibrated on the solar spectrum can be reliably applied to radial-velocity measurements of stars with non-solar metallicities, provided they have solar effective temperature and surface gravity.
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BibTeX
@misc{vukadinovic2026metallicity,
title = {{Metallicity does not reorder line-to-line sensitivity to granulation in solar-like stars}},
author = {Dušan Vukadinović and Sowmya Krishnamurthy and Valeriy Vasilyev and Veronika Witzke and Andrew Collier Cameron},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.11763},
eprint = {2610.11763},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11763},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Metallicity does not reorder line-to-line sensitivity to granulation in solar-like stars
AU - Dušan Vukadinović
AU - Sowmya Krishnamurthy
AU - Valeriy Vasilyev
AU - Veronika Witzke
AU - Andrew Collier Cameron
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.11763
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11763
AB - Stellar granulation imprints line-dependent wavelength shifts and profile variations that limit the precision of radial velocity (RV) measurements used for exoplanet detection and characterization. Understanding how the sensitivity of individual spectral lines to granulation depends on stellar parameters is therefore essential for mitigating granulation-induced RV signals. Here, we investigate the effect of metallicity using MURaM 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations of stellar granulation including a small-scale dynamo for metallicities M/H={−1.0,−0.5,0.0,0.3,0.5}. We synthesize spectra of neutral and ionized lines spanning a broad range of lower excitation potentials and transition probabilities using the MPS-ATLAS code, assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium. We quantify the sensitivity to granulation using the continuum-intensity-weighted standard deviations of the line centre-of-gravity wavelength and equivalent width, denoted by σ_λ and σ_W, respectively. Both metrics increase systematically with metallicity at disc centre owing to the combined effects of more vigorous convection and metallicity-dependent changes in the line opacity. We find that the correlation between the solar (M/H=0.0) and non-solar sensitivity metrics remains high from the disk center to the stellar limb. This indicates that the relative ordering of line sensitivities is robust against changes in viewing angle and metallicity. Consequently, line masks calibrated on the solar spectrum can be reliably applied to radial-velocity measurements of stars with non-solar metallicities, provided they have solar effective temperature and surface gravity.
ER -