The Extreme Ultraviolet and X-Ray Sun in Time: High-Energy Evolutionary Tracks of a Solar-Like Star

By Lin Tu, Colin P. Johnstone, M. Gudel, H. Lammer. 2015

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aims. We aim to describe the pre-main sequence and main-sequence evolution of X-ray and extreme-ultaviolet radiation of a solar mass star based on its rotational evolution starting with a realistic range of initial rotation rates. Methods. We derive evolutionary tracks of X-ray radiation based on a rotational evolution model for solar mass stars and the rotation-activity relation. We compare these tracks to X-ray luminosity distributions of stars in clusters with different ages. Results. We find agreement between the evolutionary tracks derived from rotation and the X-ray luminosity distributions from observations. Depending on the initial rotation rate, a star might remain at the X-ray saturation level for very different time periods, approximately from 10 Myr to 300 Myr for slow and fast rotators, respectively. Conclusions. Rotational evolution with a spread of initial conditions leads to a particularly wide distribution of possible X-ray luminosities in the age range of 20 to 500 Myrs, before rotational convergence and therefore X-ray luminosity convergence sets in. This age range is crucial for the evolution of young planetary atmospheres and may thus lead to very different planetary evolution histories.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04b9bef628bd4d4938d7ea5383c377ee8e83d736

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Owen
2. Yanqin Wu
3. Sheng Jin
4. C. Mordasini
5. P. Withers
6. D. Lai
7. M. Gudel
8. James R. A. Davenport

In Instrumentation

1. J. Owen
2. Yanqin Wu
3. Sheng Jin
4. C. Mordasini
5. D. Lai
6. R. Sari
7. H. Schlichting
8. S. Ginzburg

Citations in the corpus

• Do Kepler Superflare Stars Really Include Slowly Rotating Sun-like Stars?—Results Using APO 3.5 m Telescope Spectroscopic Observations and Gaia-DR2 Data (2019, background): “5–0.6 Gyr, a large scatter in the age–rotation relation has been reported from young cluster observations (e.g., Soderblom et al. 1993; Ayres 1997; Tu et al. 2015).”
• Origin and evolution of the atmospheres of early Venus, Earth and Mars (2018, methodology): “Translating rotation to high-energy radiation, Tu et al. (2015) reported the finding illustrated in Fig.”
• Strange messenger: A new history of hydrogen on Earth, as told by Xenon (2018, background): “It is observed that older sunlike stars emit less X-ray and FUV radiation (Zahnle and Walker, 1982; Ribas et al., 2005; Claire et al., 2012; Tu et al., 2015).”
• Compositional Imprints in Density–Distance–Time: A Rocky Composition for Close-in Low-mass Exoplanets from the Location of the Valley of Evaporation (2017, background): “It is however clear that this spread in LXUV, as well as different efficiencies of evaporation (here also fixed to one value) could have important effects on the impact of evaporation (Tu et al. 2015).”
• Core-powered mass-loss and the radius distribution of small exoplanets (2017, background): “Another aspect of this difference is the large scatter in the high-energy flux of stars with the same mass (Tu et al. 2015), leading to a less distinct photoevaporation “desert” of short-period low-density planets, compared to the core cooling scenario.”
• Atmospheric Escape and the Evolution of Close-In Exoplanets (2018, methodology): “This “saturation timescale” (tsat) typically lasts 100 Myr (Jackson et al. 2012; Tu et al. 2015).”
• Loss of the Martian atmosphere to space: Present-day loss rates determined from MAVEN observations and integrated loss through time (2018, background): “In part, this variation is due to uncertainties in the extrapolation of the EUV flux back in time, with the history of the Sun not necessarily being identical to the average behavior of Sun-like stars (Ribas et al., 2005; Tu et al., 2015).”
• Photoevaporation and high-eccentricity migration created the sub-Jovian desert (2018, background): “Since a star is only UV/X-ray bright for of order 100 Myr (Ribas et al. 2005; Jackson et al. 2012; Tu et al. 2015), photoevaporation predominately occurs at early times.”
• The Evaporation Valley in the Kepler Planets (2017, methodology): “(22) We further choose a0 = 0.5 and tsat = 100 Myrs, and Lsat ≈ 10−3.5L (M∗/M ), motivated by the body of observational and modelling works (e.g. Güdel et al. 1997; Ribas et al. 2005; Jackson et al. 2012; Tu et al. 2015).”