Issue |
A&A
Volume 666, October 2022
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A198 | |
Number of page(s) | 10 | |
Section | Stellar structure and evolution | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202244268 | |
Published online | 26 October 2022 |
X-ray flares of the young planet host Ds Tucanae A
1
INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, Piazza del Parlamento 1, 90134 Palermo, Italy
e-mail: ignazio.pillitteri@inaf.it
2
Università degli Studi di Palermo, Piazza Marina 61, 90133 Palermo, Italy
3
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 02138 Garden St, Cambridge, MA, USA
Received:
14
June
2022
Accepted:
15
August
2022
The discovery of planets around young stars has spurred novel studies of the early phases of planetary formation and evolution. Stars are strong emitters at X-ray and UV wavelengths in their first billion of years and this strongly affects the evaporation, thermodynamics, and chemistry in the atmospheres of the young planets orbiting around them. In order to investigate these effects in young exoplanets, we observed the 40 Myr old star DS Tuc A with XMM-Newton. We recorded two X-ray bright flares, with the second event occurring about 12 ks after the first one. Their duration, from the rise to the end of the decay, was about 8 − 10 ks in soft X-rays (0.3–10 keV). The flares were also recorded in the 200–300 nm band with the UVM2 filter of the Optical Monitor. The duration of the flares in UV was about 3 ks. The observed delay between the peak in the UV band and in X-rays is a probe of the heating phase, followed by evaporation and an increase in the density and emission of the flaring loop. The coronal plasma temperature at the two flare peaks reached 54–55 MK. Diagnostics based on the temperatures and timescales of the flares applied to these two events have allowed us to infer a loop length of 5 − 7 × 1010 cm, which is about the extent of the stellar radius. We also inferred the values of electron density at the flare peaks of 2.3 − 6.5 × 1011 cm−3, along with a minimum magnetic field strength on the order of 300–500 G that is needed to confine the plasma. The energy released during the flares was on the order of 5 − 8 × 1034 erg in the bands 0.3 − 10 keV and 0.9 − 2.7 × 1033 erg in the UV band (200–300 nm). We speculate that the flares were associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that hit the planet about 3.3 h after the flares, which dramatically increased the rate of evaporation for the planet. From the RGS spectra, we retrieved the emission measure distribution and the abundances of coronal metals during the quiescent and flaring states, respectively. Finally, we inferred a high electron density measurement, which is in agreement with the inferences drawn from time-resolved spectroscopy and EPIC spectra, as well as the analysis of RGS spectra during the flares.
Key words: stars: activity / stars: coronae / X-rays: stars / stars: flare
© I. Pillitteri et al. 2022
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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