Abstract

Poster - Splinter Exoplanets

Thursday, 14 September 2023, 14:30   (H 3007)

Resolving the numbers and latitudes of flaring regions on low mass stars with Kepler

Ekaterina Ilin [1], Ruth Angus [2,3], Rodrigo Luger [3], Brett M. Morris [4], Florian U. Jehn [5,6]
[1] Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), Germany [2] American Museum of Natural History, NY, USA [3] Center for Computational Astrophysics, NY, USA [4] Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA [5] Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany [6] Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), Fairbanks, AK, USA.

In low mass stars, the stellar dynamo and the resulting flaring activity and space weather directly affect the environment in which potentially habitable planets reside. In particular, the locations and numbers of flaring regions on the stellar surface indicate where flux emerges from the interior, and pinpoint the launching sites of energetic particles. However, localizing flares on stars other than the Sun is a challenging task. In this poster, we summarize the currently small sample of directly localized flares on low mass stars, and present a new technique for measuring the average latitudes of flaring regions as a function of the number of these regions in stellar ensembles. We demonstrate the technique on Sun-like stars, using their optical flare monitoring with the Kepler satellite. We show that old, slowly rotating G dwarfs likely have more and/or faster evolving flaring regions than their younger, more rapidly rotating counterparts. The growing archive of continuous flare monitoring with Kepler, TESS, and soon PLATO, will enable application of this technique on a large scale across the lower main sequence.