Fast optical flares from M dwarfs detected by a one-second-cadence survey with Tomo-e Gozen
Masataka Aizawa, Kojiro Kawana, Kazumi Kashiyama, Ryou Ohsawa, Hajime Kawahara, Fumihiro Naokawa, Tomoyuki Tajiri, Noriaki Arima, Hanchun Jiang, Tilman Hartwig, Kotaro Fujisawa, Toshikazu Shigeyama, Ko Arimatsu, Mamoru Doi, Toshihiro Kasuga, Naoto Kobayashi, Sohei Kondo, Yuki Mori, Shin-ichiro Okumura, Satoshi Takita, Shigeyuki Sako
Abstract
Abstract We report on a one-second-cadence wide-field survey for M-dwarf flares using the Tomo-e Gozen camera mounted on the Kiso Schmidt telescope. We detect 22 flares from M3–M5 dwarfs with a rise time of 5 s ≲ trise ≲ 100 s and an amplitude of 0.5 ≲ ΔF/F⋆ ≲ 20. The flare light-curves mostly show steeper rises and shallower decays than those obtained from the Kepler one-minute cadence data and tend to have flat peak structures. Assuming a blackbody spectrum with a temperature of 9000–15000 K, the peak luminosities and energies are estimated to be 1029 erg s−1 ≲ Lpeak ≲ 1031 erg s−1 and 1031 erg ≲ Eflare ≲ 1034 erg, which constitutes the bright end of fast optical flares for M dwarfs. We confirm that more than $90\%$ of the host stars of the detected flares are magnetically active based on their Hα-emission-line intensities obtained by LAMOST. An estimated occurrence rate of detected flares is ∼0.7 per day per active star, indicating they are common in magnetically active M dwarfs. We argue that the flare light-curves can be explained by the chromospheric compression model: the rise time is broadly consistent with the Alfvén transit time of a magnetic loop with a length scale of lloop ∼ 104 km and a field strength of 1000 gauss, while the decay time is likely determined by the radiative cooling of the compressed chromosphere down near to the photosphere with a temperature of ≳ 10000 K. These flares from M dwarfs could be a major contamination source for a future search of fast optical transients of unknown types.