Chasing Young Star Superflares Using the Evryscopes

Using real time detections from the Evryscope-South we have begun a study of large flaring events (superflares) from young stars (<1 Gyr). These energetic flares emit in excess of 10³³ erg, 10-1000x the energy of the largest solar flares. High energy superflare events directly impact the potential habitability of any orbiting planets. Young stars flare significantly more often than their older counterparts. Superflares from these stars could support life on planets orbiting outside of the habitable zone, or strip conventionally habitable planets of their atmospheres. Very few multi-band or spectral measurements exist of superflares from populations of young stars; this project aims to expand on these systems by at least an order of magnitude. We use the Evryscope-South to search for superflare events occurring in real time. The Evryscopes are full-sky, high-cadence telescopes that are based in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The two instruments are located on Cerro Tololo in Chile and Mount Laguna in California, and each monitor the full sky using 24 6.1 cm aperture telescopes on a shared mount, covering 30 million targets at a two-minute cadence. The Evryscope-South triggers on flares as they start (a 25% flux increase is easily detectable and can represent the start of a superflare). Using the real-time alerts from the Evryscope we target SOAR’s Goodman spectrograph on superflares as they happen, allowing us to capture nearly all of the flare evolution and decay processes.