English

Hunting for stellar coronal mass ejections

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2022-11-11 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

Solar flares are often accompanied by filament/prominence eruptions, sometimes leading to coronal mass ejections (CMEs). By analogy, we expect that stellar flares are also associated with stellar CMEs whose properties are essential to know the impact on exoplanet habitability. Probable detections of stellar CMEs are still rare, but in this decade, there are several reports that (super-)flares on M/K-dwarfs and evolved stars sometimes show blue-shifted optical/UV/X-ray emissions lines, XUV/FUV dimming, and radio bursts. Some of them are interpreted as indirect evidence of stellar prominence eruptions/CMEs on cool stars. More recently, evidence of stellar filament eruption, probably leading to a CME, is reported even on a young solar-type star (G-dwarf) as a blue-shifted absorption of Hα\alpha line associated with a superflare. Notably, the erupted masses for superflares are larger than those of the largest solar CMEs, indicating severe influence on exoplanet environments. The ratio of the kinetic energy of stellar CMEs to flare energy is significantly smaller than expected from the solar scaling relation and this discrepancy is still in debate. We will review the recent updates of stellar CME studies and discuss the future direction in this paper.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.05506,
  title  = {Hunting for stellar coronal mass ejections},
  author = {Kosuke Namekata and Hiroyuki Maehara and Satoshi Honda and Yuta Notsu and Daisaku Nogami and Kazunari Shibata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.05506},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Appear in Proceedings of IAUGA 2022 Focus Meeting 5 "Beyond the Goldilocks Zone: the Effect of Stellar Magnetic Activity on Exoplanet Habitability" H. Korhonen, J. Espinosa & M. Smith-Spanier eds

R2 v1 2026-06-28T05:35:31.778Z