English

A huge-amplitude white-light superflare on a L0 brown dwarf discovered by GWAC survey

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2023-04-12 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

White-light superflares from ultra cool stars are thought to be resulted from magnetic reconnection, but the magnetic dynamics in a fully convective star is not clear yet. In this paper, we report a stellar superflare detected with the Ground Wide Angle Camera (GWAC), along with rapid follow-ups with the F60A, Xinglong 2.16m and LCOGT telescopes. The effective temperature of the counterpart is estimated to be 2200±502200\pm50K by the BT-Settl model, corresponding to a spectral type of L0. The RR-band light curve can be modeled as a sum of three exponential decay components, where the impulsive component contributes a fraction of 23\% of the total energy, while the gradual and the shallower decay phases emit 42\% and 35\% of the total energy, respectively. The strong and variable Balmer narrow emission lines indicate the large amplitude flare is resulted from magnetic activity. The bolometric energy released is about 6.4×10336.4\times10^{33} ergs, equivalent to an energy release in a duration of 143.7 hours at its quiescent level. The amplitude of ΔR=8.6\Delta R=-8.6 mag ( or ΔV=11.2\Delta V=-11.2 mag), placing it one of the highest amplitudes of any ultra cool star recorded with excellent temporal resolution. We argue that a stellar flare with such rapidly decaying and huge amplitude at distances greater than 1 kpc may be false positive in searching for counterparts of catastrophic events such as gravitational wave events or gamma-ray bursts, which are valuable in time-domain astronomy and should be given more attention.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.17415,
  title  = {A huge-amplitude white-light superflare on a L0 brown dwarf discovered by GWAC survey},
  author = {Li-Ping Xin and Hua-li Li and Jing Wang and Xu-Hui Han and Hong-Bo Cai and Xin-Bo Huang and Jia-Xin Cao and Yi-Nan Zhu and Xiang-Gao Wang and Guang-Wei Li and Bin Ren and Cheng Gao and Da Song and Lei Huang and Xiao-Meng Lu and Jian-Ying Bai and Yu-Lei Qiu and En-Wei Liang and Zi-Gao Dai and Xiang-Yu Wang and Chao Wu and Jing-Song Deng and Yuan-Gui Yang and Jian-Yan Wei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.17415},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, MNRAS accepted