The Kepler mission has led to the serendipitous discovery of a significant number of `super flares' - white light flares with energies between 10^33 erg and 10^36 erg - on solar-type stars. It has been speculated that these could be `freak' events that might happen on the Sun, too. We have started a programme to study the nature of the stars on which these super flares have been observed. Here we present high-resolution spectroscopy of 11 of these stars and discuss our results. We find that several of these stars are very young, fast-rotating stars where high levels of stellar activity can be expected, but for some other stars we do not find a straightforward explanation for the occurrence of super flares.
@article{arxiv.1406.0612,
title = {Kepler super-flare stars: what are they?},
author = {R. Wichmann and B. Fuhrmeister and U. Wolter and E. Nagel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.0612},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in A&A, 9 pages, 4 figures