English

Flare Statistics for Young Stars from a Convolutional Neural Network Analysis of $\textit{TESS}$ Data

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2020-11-04 v2 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

All-sky photometric time-series missions have allowed for the monitoring of thousands of young (tage<800t_{\rm age} < 800Myr) to understand the evolution of stellar activity. Here we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN), stella\texttt{stella}, specifically trained to find flares in Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite\textit{Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite} (TESS\textit{TESS}) short-cadence data. We applied the network to 3200 young stars to evaluate flare rates as a function of age and spectral type. The CNN takes a few seconds to identify flares on a single light curve. We also measured rotation periods for 1500 of our targets and find that flares of all amplitudes are present across all spot phases, suggesting high spot coverage across the entire surface. Additionally, flare rates and amplitudes decrease for stars tage>50t_{\rm age} > 50Myr across all temperatures Teff4000T_{\rm eff} \geq 4000K, while stars from 2300Teff<40002300 \leq T_{\rm eff} < 4000K show no evolution across 800 Myr. Stars of Teff4000T_{\rm eff} \leq 4000K also show higher flare rates and amplitudes across all ages. We investigate the effects of high flare rates on photoevaporative atmospheric mass loss for young planets. In the presence of flares, planets lose 4-7% more atmosphere over the first 1 Gyr. stella\texttt{stella} is an open-source Python tool-kit hosted on GitHub and PyPI.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.07710,
  title  = {Flare Statistics for Young Stars from a Convolutional Neural Network Analysis of $\textit{TESS}$ Data},
  author = {Adina D. Feinstein and Benjamin T. Montet and Megan Ansdell and Brian Nord and Jacob L. Bean and Maximilian N. Günther and Michael A. Gully-Santiago and Joshua E. Schlieder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.07710},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

21 pages, 17 figures, 1 table, AJ accepted