HST/COS far-UV spectra of AU Microscopii flares

DOI

High-energy X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) radiation from young stars impacts planetary atmospheric chemistry and mass loss. The active ~22Myr M-dwarf AU-Mic hosts two exoplanets orbiting interior to its debris disk. Therefore, this system provides a unique opportunity to quantify the effects of stellar X-ray and UV irradiation on planetary atmospheres as a function of both age and orbital separation. In this paper, we present over 5hr of far-UV (FUV) observations of AU-Mic taken with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS; 1070-1360{AA}) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). We provide an itemization of 120 emission features in the HST/COS FUV spectrum and quantify the flux contributions from formation temperatures ranging from 104 to 107K. We detect 13 flares in the FUV white-light curve with energies ranging from 1029 to 1031erg/s. The majority of the energy in each of these flares is released from the transition region between the chromosphere and the corona. There is a 100x increase in flux at continuum wavelengths {lambda}<1100{AA} in each flare, which may be caused by thermal Bremsstrahlung emission. We calculate that the baseline atmospheric mass-loss rate for AU-Micb is ~108g/s, although this rate can be as high as ~1014g/s during flares with L_flare_~10^33^erg/s. Finally, we model the transmission spectra for AU-Micb and c with a new panchromatic spectrum of AU Mic and motivate future JWST observations of these planets.

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.51640110
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/164/110
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/164/110
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/AJ/164/110
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/164/110
Provenance
Creator Feinstein A.D.; France K.; Youngblood A.; Duvvuri G.M.; Teal D.J.,Cauley P.W.; Seligman D.Z.; Gaidos E.; Kempton E.M.-R.; Bean J.L.,Diamond-Lowe H.; Newton E.; Ginzburg S.; Plavchan P.; Gao P.; Schlichting H.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2023
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Interdisciplinary Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy