Intrinsic Lyα Profiles of High-velocity G, K, and M Dwarfs

Abstract

Abstract Observations of H i Lyman α, the brightest UV emission line of late-type stars, are critical for understanding stellar chromospheres and transition regions, modeling photochemistry in exoplanet atmospheres, and measuring the abundances of neutral hydrogen and deuterium in the interstellar medium. Yet Lyα observations are notoriously challenging owing to severe attenuation from interstellar gas, hindering our understanding of this important emission line’s basic morphology. We present high-resolution far- and near-UV spectroscopy of five G, K, and M dwarfs with radial velocities large enough to Doppler-shift the stellar Lyα emission line away from much of the interstellar attenuation, allowing the line core to be directly observed. We detect self-reversal in the Lyα emission-line core for all targets, and we show that the self-reversal depth decreases with increasing surface gravity. Mg ii self-reversed emission-line profiles provide some useful information to constrain the Lyα line core, but the differences are significant enough that Mg ii cannot be used directly as an intrinsic Lyα template during reconstructions. We show that reconstructions that neglect self-reversal could overestimate intrinsic Lyα fluxes by as much as 60%–100% for G and K dwarfs and 40%–170% for M dwarfs. The five stars of our sample have low magnetic activity and subsolar metallicity; a larger sample size is needed to determine how sensitive these results are to these factors.