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Dynamic Photometric Variability in Three Young Brown Dwarfs in Taurus: Detection of Optical Flares with TESS data

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2025-02-28 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

We present II-band time-series photometric variability studies of three known nearby (\sim 140 pc) and young ( \sim 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 \sim 0.96 days and \sim 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 7.09×10357.09\times10^{35} erg and 3.75×10363.75\times10^{36} erg. A magnetic field of 3.39 kG\sim3.39 ~kG 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.

Keywords

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}
}