Dynamic Photometric Variability in Three Young Brown Dwarfs in Taurus: Detection of Optical Flares with TESS data
Abstract
We present -band time-series photometric variability studies of three known nearby ( 140 pc) and young ( 1 Myr) brown dwarfs (BD) in the Taurus star-forming region in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. From 10 nights of observations over a time span of 10 years, with a typical run of 3 to 6 hours each night, we estimated that the BDs show unstable short-scale periodicity from 1.5 to 4.8 hours. Using the long-term photometry from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), we have conducted a time-resolved variability analysis of CFHT-BD-Tau 3 and CFHT-BD-Tau 4, revealing orbital periods of 0.96 days and 3 days respectively, consistent with earlier studies. We also found two superflares in TESS sector 43 data for CFHT-BD-Tau 4 and estimated the flare energies as erg and erg. A magnetic field of is required to generate such flare energies on this BD. We performed spot modelling analysis on CFHT-BD-Tau 3 and CFHT-BD-Tau 4 to address the variability detected in the data using the package BASSMAN. Spectral energy distribution and infrared colours of the sources suggest that they have a sufficient amount of circumstellar material around them.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.20004,
title = {Dynamic Photometric Variability in Three Young Brown Dwarfs in Taurus: Detection of Optical Flares with TESS data},
author = {Samrat Ghosh and Soumen Mondal and Somnath Dutta and Rajib Kumbhakar and Ramkrishna Das and Santosh Joshi and Sneh Lata},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20004},
year = {2025}
}