| 20th of February 2017 |
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| 154 MHz detection of faint, polarized flares from UV Ceti |
| by Christene Lynch (CAASTRO/USyd) |
| Flaring activity is a common characteristic of magnetically active stars. Flare events produce emission throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, implying a range of physical processes. The number of stars where radio emission has been detected is few, with numbers limited to a few tens of objects. Observations of a wider sample of active stellar systems are necessary in order to establish the fraction that exhibit radio bursts and to relate occurrence of these bursts to basic physical parameters of these stellar objects. To better constrain stellar flare rates at 154 MHz, Dr Christene Lynch (University of Sydney, CAASTRO) and collaborators used the Murchison Widefield Array to observe UV Ceti, an M dwarf star known to exhibit magnetically driven flares. They detected four circularly polarised, dim flares from UV Ceti. Using the detected flares they measured the first flare rates for stellar flares with intensities < 100 mJy at 154 MHz. Reference: Lynch, Lenc, Murphy, Kaplan, and Anderson "154 MHz detection of faint, polarized flares from UV Ceti" (2017), Astrophysical Journal Letters (accepted) |