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Among stellar systems, we find many with applications of SOC, such as stellar flares or pulsar glitches. Stellar flares occur mostly in the wavelength ranges of ultraviolet, soft X-rays and UV, and in visible light. A breakthrough in new stellar data was accomplished with the Kepler spacecraft, which allowed unprecedented detections of exoplanets, while the same light curves could be searched for large stellar flares. Exploiting these promising new datasets, one finds that most stellar flare datasets exhibit dominant size distributions that converges to a power law slope of , regardless of the star type. The size distributions of pulsar glitches are mostly found outside of the valid range of the Standard FD-SOC model and thus require a different model. Power law fits are not always superior to fits with the log-normal function or Weibull function. This discrepancy between observed and modeled power law slopes in stellar SOC systems is mostly due to small-number statistics of the samples, incomplete sampling near the lower threshold, and due to ill-defined power law fitting ranges, which can cause significant deviations from ideal power laws.
The manifold requirements for a world to sustain habitability on long timescales (continuous habitability) are delineated in this chapter. The first part offers a brief introduction to climate physics (e.g., greenhouse effect), and thereupon formulates the notion of the habitable zone, that is, the region where liquid water could exist on rocky planets orbiting stars; the boundaries of the habitable zone as a function of the stellar temperature are also presented. In the second part, the various stellar factors potentially involved in regulating planetary habitability are sketched: winds, flares and space weather, and electromagnetic radiation. The third part chronicles some planetary variables that may affect habitability: mass, plate tectonics, magnetic field, tidal locking, and atmospheric composition. The last part is devoted to examining the high-energy astrophysical processes that might impact habitability on galactic scales: candidates in this regard include supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and active supermassive black holes.
A comparative analysis of sub-THz emission of stellar flares from red dwarfs has been carried out. ALMA observations indicate that the sub-THz emission flux from stellar flares with a duration of 10 s is an order of magnitude greater than for solar flares. The sub-THz emission is linearly polarized and decreases with frequency. The degree of polarization can reach tens of percent. We show that these types of spectrum slopes and linear polarization can be caused by the synchrotron emission of ultrarelativistic electrons. The origin of the observed relationships between sub-THz, low frequency radio, and X-ray emissions of stellar flares are discussed.
We present a method for identifying radio stellar sources using their proper-motion. We demonstrate this method using the FIRST, VLASS, RACS-low and RACS-mid radio surveys, and astrometric information from Gaia Data Release 3. We find eight stellar radio sources using this method, two of which have not previously been identified in the literature as radio stars. We determine that this method probes distances of $\sim$90pc when we use FIRST and RACS-mid, and $\sim$250pc when we use FIRST and VLASS. We investigate the time baselines required by current and future radio sky surveys to detect the eight sources we found, with the SKA (6.7 GHz) requiring $<$3 yr between observations to find all eight sources. We also identify nine previously known and 43 candidate variable radio stellar sources that are detected in FIRST (1.4 GHz) but are not detected in RACS-mid (1.37 GHz). This shows that many stellar radio sources are variable, and that surveys with multiple epochs can detect a more complete sample of stellar radio sources.
Recently, many superflares on solar-type stars were discovered as white-light flares (WLFs). A correlation between the energies (E) and durations (t) of superflares is derived as t∝E0.39, and this can be theoretically explained by magnetic reconnection (t∝E1/3). In this study, we carried out a statistical research on 50 solar WLFs with SDO/HMI to examine the t-E relation. As a result, the t-E relation on solar WLFs (t∝E0.38) is quite similar stellar superflares, but the durations of stellar superflares are much shorter than those extrapolated from solar WLFs. We present the following two interpretations; (1) in solar flares, the cooling timescale of WL emission may be longer than the reconnection one, and the decay time can be determined by the cooling timescale; (2) the distribution can be understood by applying a scaling law t∝E1/3B−5/3 derived from the magnetic reconnection theory.
Solar and stellar flares due to impacts of comet nuclei and falling evaporating bodies, FEBs, with the Sun/stars are analytically considered. It is shown that impacts of sun/stargrazing comets will be accompanied by essential aerodynamic effects: nuclei crushing and expansion/ flattening of crushed mass within the chromosphere. These processes lead to impulse generation of a hot plasma, strong shock wave in the thin layer near photosphere, eruption of the hot ionized clump to the lower corona, i.e., impact-induced solar/stellar flares.
With the possible exception of meteor impacts, high-energy astrophysical events such as supernovae, gamma-ray bursts (GRB) and flares are usually not taken into account for biological and evolutionary studies due to their low rates of occurrence. We show that a class of these events may occur at distances and time scales in which their biological effects are non-negligible, maybe more frequent than the impacts of large asteroids. We review the effects of four transient astrophysical sources of ionizing radiation on biospheres – stellar flares, giant flares from soft gamma repeaters (SGR), supernovae and GRB. The main damaging features of them are briefly discussed and illustrated. We point out some open problems and ongoing work.
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