2014/05/27 by R. Wichmann, B. Fuhrmeister, U. Wolter +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Educational Leadership and Practices #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201423717
published as A&A 567, A36 (2014) · Accepted for publication in A&A, 9 pages, 4 figures
openalex publication_date 2014/05/27 · arxiv created 2014/06/03 · arxiv updated 2014/09/05 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The Kepler mission has led to the serendipitous discovery of a significant number of “super flares” – white light flares with energies between 1033 erg and 1036 erg – on solar-type stars. It has been speculated that these could be “freak” events that might happen on the Sun, too. We have started a programme to study the nature of the stars on which these super flares have been observed. Here we present high-resolution spectroscopy of 11 of these stars and discuss our results. We find that several of these stars are very young, fast-rotating stars where high levels of stellar activity can be expected, but for some other stars we do not find a straightforward explanation for the occurrence of super flares.