Kepler super-flare stars: what are they?

Abstract

The Kepler mission has led to the serendipitous discovery of a significant number of `super flares' - white light flares with energies between 10^33 erg and 10^36 erg - on solar-type stars. It has been speculated that these could be `freak' events that might happen on the Sun, too. We have started a programme to study the nature of the stars on which these super flares have been observed. Here we present high-resolution spectroscopy of 11 of these stars and discuss our results. We find that several of these stars are very young, fast-rotating stars where high levels of stellar activity can be expected, but for some other stars we do not find a straightforward explanation for the occurrence of super flares.

Accepted for publication in A&A, 9 pages, 4 figures

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Simultaneous Kepler/K2 and XMM-Netwon observations of superflares in the Pleiades
• High Dispersion Spectroscopy of Solar-type Superflare Stars. I. Temperature, Surface Gravity, Metallicity, and $v\sin i$
• Supernovae and Single-Year Anomalies in the Atmospheric Radiocarbon Record
• High Dispersion Spectroscopy of Solar-type Superflare Stars. III. Lithium Abundances