Surface velocity network with anti-solar differential rotation on the active K-giant $σ$ Geminorum

Abstract

We demonstrate the power of the local correlation tracking technique on stellar data for the first time. We recover the spot migration pattern of the long-period RS CVn-type binary $σ$ Gem from a set of six Doppler images from 3.6 consecutive rotation cycles. The resulting surface flow map suggests a weak anti-solar differential rotation with $α\approx-0.0022\pm0.0016$, and a coherent poleward spot migration with an average velocity of $220\pm10$ m s$^{-1}$. This result agrees with our recent findings from another study and could also be confirmed theoretically.