SAGE: A tool for constraining the impacts of stellar activity on transmission spectroscopy

Abstract

Transmission spectroscopy is a proven technique for studying a transiting exoplanet’s atmosphere. However, stellar surface inhomogeneities – spots and faculae – alter the observed transmission spectra: the stellar contamination effect. The variable nature of the stellar activity also makes it difficult to stitch together multi-epoch observations and evaluate any potential variability in the exoplanet’s atmosphere. This paper introduces SAGE, a tool that corrects for the time-dependent impact of stellar activity on transmission spectra. It uses a pixelation approach to model the stellar surface with spots and faculae, while fully accounting for limb-darkening and rotational line-broadening. The current version is designed for low- to medium-resolution spectra. We used SAGE to evaluate stellar contamination for F- to M-type hosts, testing various spot sizes and locations, and quantify the impact of limb-darkening. We find that limb-darkening enhances the importance of the spot location on the stellar disc, with spots close to the disc centre impacting the transmission spectra more strongly than spots near the limb. Moreover, due to the chromaticity of limb-darkening, the shape of the contamination spectrum is also altered. Additionally, SAGE can be used to retrieve the properties and distribution of active regions on the stellar surface from photometric monitoring. We demonstrate this for WASP-69 using TESS data, finding that two spots at midlatitudes and a combined coverage fraction of ~1% are favoured. SAGE allows us to connect the photometric variability to the stellar contamination of transmission spectra, enhancing our ability to jointly interpret transmission spectra obtained at different epochs.