Hunting for Stellar Coronal Mass Ejections

Abstract

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are explosive events that occur basically daily on the Sun. It is thought that these events play a crucial role in the angular momentum and mass loss of late-type stars, and also shape the environment in which planets form and live. Stellar CMEs can be detected in optical spectra in the Balmer lines, especially in Halpha, as blue-shifted extra emission/absorption. To increase the detection probability one can monitor young open clusters, in which the stars are due to their youth still rapid rotators, and thus magnetically active and likely to exhibit a large number of CMEs. Using ESO facilities and the Nordic Optical Telescope we have obtained time series of multi-object spectroscopic observations of late-type stars in six open clusters with ages ranging from 15 Myrs to 300 Myrs. Additionally, we have studied archival data of numerous active stars. These observations will allow us to obtain information on the occurrence rate of CMEs in late-type stars with different ages and spectral types. Here we report on the preliminary outcome of our studies.

6 pages, submitted to the proceedings of IAU Symposium 328 'Living Around Active Stars'

References in corpus (3)

• The large-scale axisymmetric magnetic topology of avery-low-mass fully-convective star
• Connecting Flares and Transient Mass Loss Events in Magnetically Active Stars
• A search for flares and mass ejections on young late-type stars in the open cluster Blanco-1

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Stellar Coronal Mass Ejections
• Stellar coronal mass ejections II. Constraints from spectroscopic observations
• Slingshot prominences: coronal structure, mass loss and spin down
• Slingshot prominences: a hidden mass loss mechanism
• The Flare-Activity of 2MASSJ16111534-1757214 in the Upper Scorpius association