If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know we often talk about starspots on the surfaces of young stars. These spots are responsible for the periodic dips and rises we see in their light curves. Back in March last year (Week 271), we shared two plots from a paper we published, where we measured the sizes and temperatures of these spots on stars within the Pelican Nebula—one of the regions in our HOYS survey.
That work didn’t stop there! We’ve now extended our analysis to include all starspots detected across the entire HOYS survey—and the updated plot is shown above. At first glance, it might seem like not much has changed (spot the difference, anyone? 😉), but the new version includes many more stars. Visually, the overall distributions look strikingly similar to what we saw in the Pelican Nebula, suggesting those stars may actually be typical representatives of young, spotted stars in general.
But the real excitement lies ahead. With this much larger sample, we can now begin to explore how starspot properties relate to other stellar characteristics—such as age, rotation period, or mass—in a statistically meaningful way. These were questions we simply couldn’t answer with data from a single region.
It’s a big step forward for the HOYS project—and one of the investigations that’ll be keeping us busy this summer! Stay tuned for what we discover next.