Hazardous early days in (and beyond) the habitable zones around ultra-low-mass STARS although a majority of STARS in the solar neighborhood are of mid- to late-m type, the magnetically-induced coronal…

This federal contract award, with identification number NNX16AG13G, was granted by the Shared Services Center, a civilian agency, to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to conduct research related to "Hazardous Early Days in (and Beyond) the Habitable Zones Around Ultra-Low-Mass Stars". The $266,413.00 grant is intended to support RIT's efforts to investigate the early evolution of coronal activity and high-energy processes associated with young, low-mass stars, and the potential effects on planet formation. The research leverages existing X-ray data from the XMM-Newton and Chandra space observatories to better understand the dispersal of protoplanetary disks and atmospheric evaporation around these types of stars. This award is not associated with a set-aside program and is funded through a grant for research.

Hazardous early days in (and beyond) the habitable zones around ultra-low-mass STARS although a majority of STARS in the solar neighborhood are of mid- to late-m type, the magnetically-induced coronal (x-RAY) and chromospheric (UV, h-alpha) activity of such STARS remain essentially unexplored for the important age range 10-100 MYR. Such information on high-energy processes associated with young m STARS would provide much-needed constraints on models of the effects of stellar irradiation on the physics and chemistry of planet-forming disks and newborn planets. In addition, x-RAY and UV observations of ultra-low-mass young STARS can serve to probe the (presently ILL-defined) spectral type boundary that determines which very low-mass objects will eventually become m STARS -- as opposed to brown dwarfs (BDS) -- following their pre-main sequence evolutionary stages. Via adap support, we have developed the galex nearby young star search (galnyss), a search method that combines galex, 2MASS, wise and proper motion catalog information to identify nearby, young, low-mass STARS. We have applied this method to identify ~2000 candidate young (10-100 MYR), low-mass (m-type) STARS within 150 PC. These galnyss-identified young star candidates are distributed over the entire galex-covered sky, and their spectral types peak in the M3-4 range; followup optical spectroscopic work is ongoing (rodriguez ET AL. 2013, APJ, 774, 101). We now propose an ADA program to determine the x-RAY properties of representative STARS among these galnyss candidates, so as to confirm their youth and investigate the early evolution of coronal activity near the low-mass star/BD boundary and the effects of such activity on planet formation. Specifically, we will exploit the presence in the heasarc archives of XMM-newton and (to a lesser extent) chandra x-RAY observatory data for a few dozen galnyss candidates that have been observed serendipitously by one or both of these space observatories. The proposed ADA program will yield the full reduction and analysis of these as-yet unexplored data. The results will be used to constrain models describing the dispersal of protoplanetary disks and evaporation of planetary atmospheres due to intense irradiation by high-energy photons from young, low-mass STARS, and to shed new light on the early evolution of magnetic activity of STARS with masses down to near the h-burning limit.