Rotation, Activity, and Flaring of Kepler’s Habitable Planet
Hosts
D. J. Armstrong, D. L. Pollacco
Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK, d.j.armstrong@warwick.ac.uk
Abstract
The Kepler satellite has discovered thousands of plan-
etary candidates, and confirmed hundreds of those.
Among these confirmed planets, several rank highly
on scales of ’habitability’, including well-known ob-
jects such as Kepler-22b, Kepler-61b and others. We
have been studying the host stars of these habitable
planets, with the aim of investigating the effects of the
host on habitability. Here we will present studies of
the activity levels, rotation periods, and flare proper-
ties of the hosts. These have been measured through
the Kepler data, utilising several photometric proxies
for magnetic activity. Two separate methods, the auto-
correlation-function and a wavelet based analysis, are
used to study stellar rotation, which is a necessary
prerequisite to obtaining reliable measures of activity.
These properties of the host star impact strongly on
putative habitability, being an indication of the levels
of radiation and coronal mass ejections experienced at
the planet’s orbit.
EPSC Abstracts
Vol. 10, EPSC2015-246, 2015
European Planetary Science Congress 2015
c Author(s) 2015
EPSC
European Planetary Science Congress