Flares: the Solar-Stellar Connection

The Solar–Stellar Connection

The discovery that radio emission from stars is quite common and readily detectable was one of the unexpected advances produced by the Very Large Array [35,11]. This discovery could not be predicted based on what we know of the Sun’s radio emission, even though similar physical mechanisms are operating in stellar radio sources and so knowledge of the Sun’s emission is essential for understandin...

Modeling Solar and Stellar Flares

Scaling Laws of Solar and Stellar Flares

In this study we compile for the first time comprehensive data sets of solar and stellar flare parameters, including flare peak temperatures Tp, flare peak volume emission measures EMp, and flare durations τf from both solar and stellar data, as well as flare length scales L from solar data. Key results are that both the solar and stellar data are consistent with a common scaling law of EMp ∝ T...

Asteroseismology and the Solar-Stellar Connection

In March 2009, NASA will launch the Kepler satellite—a mission designed to discover habitable Earth-like planets around distant Sun-like stars. The method that Kepler will use to detect distant worlds will only reveal the size of the planet relative to the size of the host star, so part of the mission is devoted to characterizing other suns using asteroseismology. In this proceedings, I give a ...

Nucleosynthesis in stellar flares

Nuclear interactions of ions accelerated at the surface of flaring stars can produce fresh isotopes in stellar atmospheres. Although this nucleosynthesis is not significant for the chemical evolution of the Galaxy, it can be important for a number of measurements of “anomalously” high Li and Li abundances. We discuss the possible role of stellar flares to explain the recent report of high Li ab...