Flaring Stars and the Long Wavelength Array

Coherent emission appears to be a common phenomenon on radio-active late-type stars. Solar radio flare emissions below 3 GHz are rich and varied, arising from coherent processes in the upper solar atmosphere (Dulk 1985; Isliker & Benz 1994). Studies of decimetric radio emission from M dwarf flare stars have led to discovery of high brightness temperature, highly circularly polarized bursts (Bastian et al. 1990) generally attributed to plasma radiation or emission from an electron-cyclotron maser. Observations, mainly at L-band, have revealed that highly circular polarized emission from active binary system (RS CVn and BY Dra binaries) coronae is fairly common, probably also produced by a coherent mechanism (White & Franciosini 1995). Even more recently, some very low mass stars and brown dwarfs have been observed to undergo highly circularly polarized bursts, generally at higher frequencies (5–8 GHz; Burgasser & Putman 2005). All three of these classes of stars can be considered as potential Long Wavelength Array (LWA) sources. As discussed below, there are more than a thousand potential LWA stellar sources of these three classes, and we expect a large number of detections from these (as well as detections from more distant objects).