The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) [1] is delivering outstanding results in several areas of planetary science.
The two largest TESS catalogs of stellar flares have been just released: [2,3] and [4], respectively. These comprise ~25,000 M-dwarfs and ~200,000 FGKM studied stars, both with 2 min. cadence, observed during the first two TESS sectors and the first two years of the mission, respectively.
Our multidisciplinary team, is involved in the study of M-dwarfs flares and their implications in exoplanets habitability. This way, the ultimate goal of this MSc Thesis is to develop from [5] a flare-exoplanet atmosphere interaction photo-chemistry model.
This model should be able to provide depleted/catalyzed species rates, and finally be validated by the observed TESS flare frequency distributions.
More in detail, the student will:
1-get a working sample of flaring stars from TESS flares catalogs,
2-obtain the stellar parameters for the flaring stars,
3-obtain a sub-sample of flaring stars with known transiting planets,
4-obtain the orbital elements from the previous planets,
5-get another sub-sample with only those planets within the habitable zone,
6-as regard as the adaptation and implementation of the photo-chemistry model in [5],
this project considers two distinct evolutionary scenarios:
6.1-the current Earth atmosphere, where the ozone depletion would be the species to model,
6.2-the putative Archean Earth atmosphere, where prebiotic chemistry processes linked to species,
such as SO^2−_3 and HS^− [6], could be catalyzed by UV radiation from flares.