Frequent Flaring in the TRAPPIST-1 System—Unsuited for Life?
By K. Vida, Zs. KHov'ari, Andr'as P'al, K. Ol'ah, L. Kriskovics. 2017
136 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We analyze the K2 light curve of the TRAPPIST-1 system. The Fourier analysis of the data suggests Prot = 3.295 ± 0.003 days. The light curve shows several flares, of which we analyzed 42 events with integrated flare energies of 1.26 × 1030–1.24 × 1033 erg. Approximately 12% of the flares were complex, multi-peaked eruptions. The flaring and the possible rotational modulation shows no obvious correlation. The flaring activity of TRAPPIST-1 probably continuously alters the atmospheres of the orbiting exoplanets, which makes these less favorable for hosting life.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9fd325c2b08db44eaefbf3f145dce5a03987e3b
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- J. Lustig-Yaeger
- Laura Kreidberg
- Jon Fortney
- C. Morley
- V. Meadows
- N. Madhusudhan
- A. Lincowski
- T. Robinson
In Instrumentation
Citations in the corpus
- The Detectability and Characterization of the TRAPPIST-1 Exoplanet Atmospheres with JWST (2019, background): “However, we ignore the effects of stellar opacity in the MIR, stellar variability due to rotation and flaring during periods of observation (Vida et al. 2017; Morris et al. 2018), and heterogeneous stellar photospheres (Rackham et al. 2018; Zhang et al. 2018).”
- Observing the Atmospheres of Known Temperate Earth-sized Planets with JWST (2017, background): “This emission is also highly variable; Vida et al. (2017) found using K2 data that in addition to quiescent emission, TRAPPIST-1 frequently flares, which may alter the atmospheric chemistry of its planets.”
- The Transit Light Source Effect: False Spectral Features and Incorrect Densities for M-dwarf Transiting Planets (2017, background): “Frequent flaring (Vida et al. 2017) and strong XUV radiation from the host star (Wheatley et al. 2017), however, can lead to significant water loss for these planets (Bolmont et al. 2017), and 3D climate modeling suggests TRAPPIST-1e provides the best opportunity for present-day surface water and…”