Diagnosing stellar CMEs through post-flare coronal dimmings

Our Sun generates energetic phenomena like outbreaks of radiation (flares) and matter (CMEs), which are both thought to be caused by the restructuring of the solar magnetic field. These phenomena can interact with the Earth`s atmosphere and magnetic field, inducing various effects like, for instance, aurorae. However, they can have destructive impacts on our modern technology, including damages to satellites or large-scale power outages. On stars younger than our Sun, these activity phenomena have been found to be much more powerful than even the strongest recorded events on the present Sun and also tend to occur more frequently. If intense enough, they can have profound effects on planets orbiting these stars, in the worst case leading to complete erosion of the planetary atmospheres. This raises the question on how flares and CMEs impacted the formation and early evolution of extrasolar planets exposed to this intense activity, including the early evolution of planets in our solar system when the Sun was much more active as well. On stars other than the Sun, flares are observed routinely by a variety of space missions and are therefore characterized rather well, but the detection of stellar CMEs is still challenging. Therefore, little is known about the typical parameters of CMEs on young stars, as well as their occurrence rates. This project aims to advance this research field by investigation of so-called "post- flare coronal dimmings", which are a phenomenon closely related to CMEs on the Sun. By combining a theoretical modeling approach with solar data analyses to establish the connections between flares, CMEs and post-flare coronal dimmings, we will develop a new framework for interpreting stellar observations. Application to newly collected, as well as readily available stellar observations with detected post-flare coronal dimming signatures will thus allow the determination of the physical parameters of their associated CMEs and establish the flare-CME association rate on other stars. This will result in an unprecedented sample of stellar CMEs with well-determined properties. Our results will significantly improve the current knowledge about magnetic activity phenomena on stars other than the Sun, giving crucial insights on their importance in the early evolutionary stages of (exo)planetary systems, including their potential to evolve into habitable worlds.