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Re: flares in Mira stars > ASAS-3 is fine work, but it still only samples (at best) once per day. How > will this definitively answer the question of flaring in Miras? If the flares > lasted days, they would already be known phenomena; if they last only a few > hours, sampling </=1x/day won't help -- much. Speaking of ASAS-3 data, the large number of recorded objects and the availablity of the recorded images are the most important factors. Even if the phenomenon may be short, a large number of objects can provide useful statistics, if they randomly occur in different stars. If one would beat ASAS-3, one would have to record a selected set (not sparse coverage of a large ensemble stars) of stars with dense coverage. But I would advise to do this after we have to some degree confident from the ASAS-3 or other survey data that these phenomena occur at a meaningful rate. It would be interesting to speculate that such short-lived phenomena, if any, should emit bluer light (if the emission is thermal origin *1), which should have been detected by satellite UV monitor (just as ALEXIS did). (*1) The reason is simple. Consider the size of a Mira star and devide it by the speed of light. And consider your preferred time scale of the event, and deduce the condition in which the "flare" can dominate in the visual light against the Mira photosphere near its maximum light. Regards, Taichi Kato
Return to the Powerful Daisaku Nogami
vsnet-adm@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp
