Flare Stars Research Articles

Can Flare Stars Explain the Annihilation Line from the Galactic Bulge?

We consider the low-mass flare stars which form the bulk of the population in the galactic bulge as a source of the positrons needed to form the observed narrow annihilation line from the galactic bulge. Estimates based on the observed flares in low-mass stars, together with observations of the annihilation line in solar flares, show that the rate of production of positrons in flares in the stars in the bulge may be sufficient to explain the formation of the narrow stationary annihilation line observed from the region of the galactic bulge.

On global and local magnetic fields of flare stars with YZ CMi and OT Ser as examples

Global magnetic fields of flare stars evolve very fast—at times of tens–hundreds of days. In our opinion, this is due to mutual addition of local magnetic fields generated by the differential rotation of these objects.With the example of two flare stars,OT Ser and YZCMi, we consider possiblemechanisms of generation and disspation of local and global magnetic fields and the mechanism of “magnetic deceleration” of these stars according to the scheme “differential rotation–generation of local magnetic fields–fluorescence of energy accumulated by local magnetic fields during flares.” We also estimated the rotation energy and global magnetic field for OT Ser and YZCMi. It is shown that even strong dissipation of the accumulated local magnetic energy in the flare on February 9, 2008 (UT 20:22:00) in YZCMi has not had any impact on the global magnetic field.

The X-Ray Binary Population of the Nearby Dwarf Starburst Galaxy IC 10: Variable and Transient X-Ray Sources

Abstract We have monitored the Cassiopeia dwarf galaxy (IC 10) in a series of 10 Chandra ACIS-S observations to capture its variable and transient X-ray source population, which is expected to be dominated by High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXBs). We present a sample of 21 X-ray sources that are variable between observations at the 3σ level, from a catalog of 110 unique point sources. We find four transients (flux variability ratio greater than 10) and a further eight objects with ratios >5. The observations span the years 2003–2010 and reach a limiting luminosity of >1035 erg s−1, providing sensitivity to X-ray binaries in IC 10 as well as flare stars in the foreground Milky Way. The nature of the variable sources is investigated from light curves, X-ray spectra, energy quantiles, and optical counterparts. The purpose of this study is to discover the composition of the X-ray binary population in a young starburst environment. IC 10 provides a sharp contrast in stellar population age (<10 My) when compared to the Magellanic Clouds (40–200 My) where most of the known HMXBs reside. We find 10 strong HMXB candidates, 2 probable background Active Galactic Nuclei, 4 foreground flare-stars or active binaries, and 5 not yet classifiable sources. Complete classification of the sample requires optical spectroscopy for radial velocity analysis and deeper X-ray observations to obtain higher S/N spectra and search for pulsations. A catalog and supporting data set are provided.

Analysis of Characteristics of Light Curve Profiles of the Flares Erupted from Sun-like Stars

Solar flares belong to a kind of eruptive phenomena caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy nearby sunspots. It is found that similar flares occurred as well in many Sun-like stars (called as Sun-like star flares). From the data acquired by the Kepler space telescope the SC (Short Cadence) data are mainly selected to make analysis, in order to find the characteristic parameters of light curve profiles of the flares erupted from Sun-like stars for a statistical study, and to summarize the activity features of these stellar flares. The analyzed results show that the light curve profiles and characteristic timescales of the flares of Sun-like stars are quite similar to those of solar flares, which may indicate the same physical mechanism for these two kinds of flares.

Discovery of the Sub-second Linearly Polarized Spikes of Synchrotron Origin in the UV Ceti Giant Optical Flare

AbstractDuring our optical monitoring of UV Ceti, iconic late-type flaring star, with high temporal resolution using the Russian 6-m telescope in 2008, we detected a giant flare with the amplitude of about 3 magnitudes in U band. Near flare maximum, more than a dozen of spike bursts have been discovered with triangular shapes and durations from 0.6 to 1.2 s and maximal luminosities in the range (1.5–8) × 1027 erg s−1. For the half of these events, the linear polarization exceeds 35% with significance better than 5σ. We argue that these events are synchrotron emission of electron streams with the energies of several hundred MeV moving in the magnetic field of about 1.4 kG. Emission from such ultra-relativistic (with energies far exceeding 10 MeV) particles is being routinely observed in solar flares, but has never been detected from UV Ceti-type stars. This is the first ever detection of linearly polarized optical light from the UV Ceti-type stars which indicates that at least some fraction of the flaring events on these stars is powered by a non-thermal synchrotron emission mechanism.

GPhoton: THE GALEX PHOTON DATA ARCHIVE

ABSTRACT gPhoton is a new database product and software package that enables analysis of GALEX ultraviolet data at the photon level. The project’s stand-alone, pure-Python calibration pipeline reproduces the functionality of the original mission pipeline to reduce raw spacecraft data to lists of time-tagged, sky-projected photons, which are then hosted in a publicly available database by the Mikulski Archive at Space Telescope. This database contains approximately 130 terabytes of data describing approximately 1.1 trillion sky-projected events with a timestamp resolution of five milliseconds. A handful of Python and command-line modules serve as a front end to interact with the database and to generate calibrated light curves and images from the photon-level data at user-defined temporal and spatial scales. The gPhoton software and source code are in active development and publicly available under a permissive license. We describe the motivation, design, and implementation of the calibration pipeline, database, and tools, with emphasis on divergence from prior work, as well as challenges created by the large data volume. We summarize the astrometric and photometric performance of gPhoton relative to the original mission pipeline. For a brief example of short time-domain science capabilities enabled by gPhoton, we show new flares from the known M-dwarf flare star CR Draconis. The gPhoton software has permanent object identifiers with the ASCL (ascl:1603.004) and DOI (doi:10.17909/T9CC7G). This paper describes the software as of version v1.27.2.

New flare stars and flares of the known ones in Orion

New flare stars and flares of the known ones in Orion

THE SEARCH FOR SIGNATURES OF TRANSIENT MASS LOSS IN ACTIVE STARS

ABSTRACT The habitability of an exoplanet depends on many factors. One such factor is the impact of stellar eruptive events on nearby exoplanets. Currently this is poorly constrained due to heavy reliance on solar scaling relationships and a lack of experimental evidence. Potential impacts of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are the large eruption of magnetic field and plasma from a star, are space weather and atmospheric stripping. A method for observing CMEs as they travel though the stellar atmosphere is the type II radio burst, and the new Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) provides a means of detection. We report on 15 hr of observation of YZ Canis Minoris (YZ CMi), a nearby M dwarf flare star, taken in LOFAR’s beam-formed observation mode for the purposes of measuring transient frequency-dependent low-frequency radio emission. The observations utilized the Low Band Antenna (10–90 MHz) or High Band Antenna (110–190 MHz) for five three-hour observation periods. In this data set, there were no confirmed type II events in this frequency range. We explore the range of parameter space for type II bursts constrained by our observations. Assuming the rate of shocks is a lower limit to the rate at which CMEs occur, no detections in a total of 15 hr of observation places a limit of shocks/hr ≤ ν CME for YZ CMi due to the stochastic nature of the events and the limits of observational sensitivity. We propose a methodology to interpret jointly observed flares and CMEs which will provide greater constraints to CMEs and test the applicability of solar scaling relations.

MOST OBSERVATIONS OF OUR NEAREST NEIGHBOR: FLARES ON PROXIMA CENTAURI

ABSTRACT We present a study of white-light flares from the active M5.5 dwarf Proxima Centauri using the Canadian microsatellite Microvariability and Oscillations of STars. Using 37.6 days of monitoring data from 2014 to 2015, we have detected 66 individual flare events, the largest number of white-light flares observed to date on Proxima Cen. Flare energies in our sample range from 1029 to 1031.5 erg. The flare rate is lower than that of other classic flare stars of a similar spectral type, such as UV Ceti, which may indicate Proxima Cen had a higher flare rate in its youth. Proxima Cen does have an unusually high flare rate given its slow rotation period, however. Extending the observed power-law occurrence distribution down to 1028 erg, we show that flares with flux amplitudes of 0.5% occur 63 times per day, while superflares with energies of 1033 erg occur ∼8 times per year. Small flares may therefore pose a great difficulty in searches for transits from the recently announced 1.27 M ⊕ Proxima b, while frequent large flares could have significant impact on the planetary atmosphere.

THE KEPLER CATALOG OF STELLAR FLARES

ABSTRACT A homogeneous search for stellar flares has been performed using every available Kepler light curve. An iterative light curve de-trending approach was used to filter out both astrophysical and systematic variability to detect flares. The flare recovery completeness has also been computed throughout each light curve using artificial flare injection tests, and the tools for this work have been made publicly available. The final sample contains 851,168 candidate flare events recovered above the 68% completeness threshold, which were detected from 4041 stars, or 1.9% of the stars in the Kepler database. The average flare energy detected is ∼1035 erg. The net fraction of flare stars increases with g − i color, or decreasing stellar mass. For stars in this sample with previously measured rotation periods, the total relative flare luminosity is compared to the Rossby number. A tentative detection of flare activity saturation for low-mass stars with rapid rotation below a Rossby number of ∼0.03 is found. A power-law decay in flare activity with Rossby number is found with a slope of −1, shallower than typical measurements for X-ray activity decay with Rossby number.

Time domain astronomy with Swift and Fermi

Swift and Fermi are unveiling an unexpectedly rich tapestry of behavior in the transient γ−ray sky. Sources which were already known to be transient − such as pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, and blazars − have been studied in ever-increasing detail. For example, Fermi/LAT has detected 117 pulsars of which 56 are new. Many of them are only seen so far in γ−rays. In the last 5 years the Crab Nebula, long taken to be a standard candle, has been observed to flare dramatically. A long monitoring campaign on Sgr A∗ with Swift has shown multiple flares on time scales of tens of days. Other sources not usually associated with high-energy emission − e.g., novae and flare stars − are proving to be interesting at γ−ray energies. Discoveries have been made of spectacular transient emission from tidal disruption events and supernova shock breakout. We present an overview of recent γ−ray and hard X-ray observations and discuss their impact on high-energy astrophysics. Keywords: Black hole physics; radiation mechanisms: non-thermal; Stars: activity; Gamma-ray burst: general; Stars: neutron, novae; Galaxies: star formation

Optical microflaring on the nearby flare star binary UV Ceti

We present extremely high time resolution observations of the visual flare star binary UV Cet obtained with the Optical Pulsar Timing Analyzer (OPTIMA) at the 1.3 m telescope at Skinakas Observatory (SKO) in Crete, Greece. OPTIMA is a fiber-fed optical instrument that uses Single Photon Avalanche Diodes to measure the arrival times of individual optical photons. The time resolution of the observations presented here was 4 μs, allowing to resolve the typical millisecond variability time scales associated with stellar flares. We report the detection of very short impulsive bursts in the blue band with well resolved rise and decay time scales of about 2 s. The overall energetics put these flares at the lower end of the known flare distribution of UV Cet.

FLARE STARS—A FAVORABLE OBJECT FOR STUDYING MECHANISMS OF NONTHERMAL ASTROPHYSICAL PHENOMENA

ABSTRACT We present a spectroscopic method for diagnosing a low-frequency electrostatic plasma turbulence (LEPT) in plasmas of flare stars. This method had been previously developed by one of us and successfully applied to diagnosing the LEPT in solar flares. In distinction to our previous applications of the method, here we use the latest advances in the theory of the Stark broadening of hydrogen spectral lines. By analyzing observed emission Balmer lines, we show that it is very likely that the LEPT was developed in several flares of AD Leo, as well as in one flare of EV Lac. We found the LEPT (though of different field strengths) both in the explosive/impulsive phase and at the phase of the maximum, as well as at the gradual phase of the stellar flares. While for solar flares our method allows diagnosing the LEPT only in the most powerful flares, for the flare stars it seems that the method allows revealing the LEPT practically in every flare. It should be important to obtain new and better spectrograms of stellar flares, allowing their analysis by the method outlined in the present paper. This can be the most favorable way to the detailed understanding of the nature of nonthermal astrophysical phenomena.

An active M star with X-ray double flares disguised as an ultra-luminous X-ray source

Here we present research on an ultra-luminous X-ray source (ULX) candidate 2XMM J140229.91+542118.8. The X-ray light curves of this ULX candidate in M101 exhibit features of a flare star. More importantly, the Chandra light curve displays unusual X-ray double flares, which is comprised of two close peaks. The X-ray (0.3–11.0 keV) flux of the first peak was derived from the two-temperature APEC model as ∼ 1.1 ± 0.1 × 10−12 erg cm−2 s−1. The observed flux at its first peak increased by about two orders of magnitude in X-ray as compared to quiescence. The slope of the second fast decay phase is steeper than the slope of the first fast decay phase, indicating that the appearance of a second flare accelerated the cooling of the first flare in a way we do not understand yet. We also observed its optical counterpart using a 2.16 m telescope administered by National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences. By optical spectral fitting, it is confirmed to be a late type dMe2.5 star. According to the spectral type and apparent magnitude of its optical counterpart, we estimate the photometric distance to be ∼ 133.4 ± 14.2 pc. According to the X-ray spectral fitting, a possible explanation is provided. However, more similar close double flares are needed to confirm whether this accelerated cooling event is a unique coincidence or a common physical process during double flaring.

PHOTOMETRIC STUDY ON STELLAR MAGNETIC ACTIVITY. I. FLARE VARIABILITY OF RED DWARF STARS IN THE OPEN CLUSTER M37

Based on one-month long MMT time-series observations of the open cluster M37, we monitored light variations of nearly 2500 red dwarfs and successfully identified 420 flare events from 312 cluster M dwarf stars. For each flare light curve, we derived observational and physical parameters, such as flare shape, peak amplitude, duration, energy, and peak luminosity. We show that cool stars produce serendipitous flares energetic enough to be observed in the $r$-band, and their temporal and peak characteristics are almost the same as those in traditional $U$-band observations. We also found many large-amplitude flares with inferred $\Delta u > 6$ mag in the cluster sample which had been rarely reported in previous ground-based observations. Following the ergodic hypothesis, we investigate in detail statistical properties of flare parameters over a range of energy ($E_{r}$ $\simeq$ $10^{31}-10^{34}$ erg). As expected, there are no statistical differences in the distributions of flare timescales, energies, and frequencies among stars of the same age and mass group. We note that our sample tend to have longer rise and decay timescales compared to those seen in field flare stars of the same spectral type and be more energetic. Flare frequency distributions follow power-law distributions with slopes $\beta \sim0.62-1.21$ for all flare stars and $\beta \sim0.52-0.97$ for stars with membership information ($P_{mem} \geq 0.2$). These are in general agreement with previous works on flare statistics of young open clusters and nearby field stars. Our results give further support to the classical age-activity relations.

Fast radio bursts: the observational case for a Galactic origin

There are by now ten published detections of fast radio bursts (FRBs), single bright GHz-band millisecond pulses of unknown origin. Proposed explanations cover a broad range from exotic processes at cosmological distances to atmospheric and terrestrial sources. Loeb et al. have previously suggested that FRB sources could be nearby flare stars, and pointed out the presence of a W-UMa-type contact binary within the beam of one out of three FRB fields that they examined. Using time-domain optical photometry and spectroscopy, we now find possible flare stars in additional FRB fields, with one to three such cases among eight FRB fields studied. We evaluate the chance probabilities of these possible associations to be in the range 0.1% to 9%, depending on the input assumptions. Further, we re-analyze the probability that two FRBs recently discovered 3 years apart within the same radio beam are unrelated. Contrary to other claims, we conclude with 99% confidence that the two events are from the same repeating source. The different dispersion measures between the two bursts then rule out a cosmological origin for the dispersion measure, but are consistent with the flare-star scenario with a varying plasma blanket between bursts. Finally, we review some theoretical objections that have been raised against a local flare-star FRB origin, and show that they are incorrect.

Flare stars across the H-R diagram: a clue to the origin of the corona

AbstractKepler observations show that starspots and superflares are present in A stars. An analysis of Kepler short-cadence data shows that the relative number of A/F flare stars is only a factor of four smaller than K/M flare stars, which can be explained as a selection effect. The average maximum flare amplitude does not depend much on spectral type, which is to be expected if the size of the active region scales in proportion to the stellar radius. The presence of starspots and superflares in A stars suggests that these stars have magnetic fields. However, X-ray observations show that A stars do not possess coronae. I therefore conclude that convection in the stellar envelope is a necessary condition for the formation of the corona. A magnetic field may be necessary to enable coronal heating.

Flares in A-type stars?

AbstractStellar flares are known to originate from magnetic reconnection in the atmospheres of late–type stars or through radiatively driven wind instabilities in early–type stars. Situated right between these two groups, the A–type stars are not expected to support either of the two mechanisms. However, recent studies report flare features in theKeplerlight curves of 32 A–type stars, contradicting theory. We investigate the stars reported in literature, setting strong constraints on the detection criteria. Although significantly fewer, we conclude that flare-like features are present. To determine the origin we obtained high-resolution spectra from the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) for the ten brightest, flaring A-type stars for 3-4 epochs. Here we present the preliminary results of these spectroscopic observations, with respect to spectral classification and binarity.

Radio spectroscopy of stellar flares: magnetic reconnection & CME shocks in stellar coronae

AbstractHigh-cadence spectroscopy of solar and stellar coherent radio bursts is a powerful diagnostic tool to study coronal conditions during magnetic reconnection in flares and to detect coronal mass ejections (CMEs). We present results from wide-bandwidth VLA observations of nearby active M dwarfs, including some observations with simultaneous VLBA imaging. We also discuss the Starburst program, which will make wide-bandwidth radio spectroscopic observations of nearby active flare stars for 20+ hours a day for multiple years, coming online in spring 2016 at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. This program should vastly increase the diversity of observed stellar radio bursts and our understanding of their origins, and offers the potential to detect a population of CME-associated radio bursts.

Ultraviolet and X-ray irradiance and flares from low-mass exoplanet host stars

AbstractThe spectral and temporal behavior of exoplanet host stars is a critical input to models of the chemistry and evolution of planetary atmospheres. High-energy photons (X-ray to NUV) from these stars regulate the atmospheric temperature profiles and photochemistry on orbiting planets, influencing the production of potential “biomarker” gases. We report first results from the MUSCLES Treasury Survey, a study of time-resolved UV and X-ray spectroscopy of nearby M and K dwarf exoplanet host stars. This program uses contemporaneous Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra (or XMM) observations to characterize the time variability of the energetic radiation field incident on the habitable zones planetary systems at d ≲ 20 pc. We find that all exoplanet host stars observed to date exhibit significant levels of chromospheric and transition region UV emission. M dwarf exoplanet host stars display 30–7000% UV emission line amplitude variations on timescales of minutes-to-hours. The relative flare/quiescent UV flux amplitudes on weakly active planet-hosting M dwarfs are comparable to active flare stars (e.g., AD Leo), despite their weak optical activity indices (e.g., Ca II H and K equivalent widths). We also detect similar UV flare behavior on a subset of our K dwarf exoplanet host stars. We conclude that strong flares and stochastic variability are common, even on “optically inactive” M dwarfs hosting planetary systems. These results argue that the traditional assumption of weak UV fields and low flare rates on older low-mass stars needs to be revised.