AAS 204th Meeting, June 2004
Session 21 Moon, Mercury, Vesta and Late Stellar Evolutio
Oral, Monday, May 31, 2004, 10:00-11:30am, 610/612

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[21.03] Solar and Stellar X-ray Cycles

P.C.H. Martens (MSU), SADE Team

Stern et al.\ have shown that Yohkoh-SXT full disk X-ray irradiance shows an 11 year cycle with an max/min amplitude ratio of a factor 30. Similar cyclic X-ray variation in Sun-like stars observed by ROSAT and its predecessors is observed in only a few cases and limited to a factor two or three. We will show, by means of detailed bandpass comparisons, that this discrepancy cannot be ascribed to the differences in energy response between SXT and the stellar soft X-ray detectors. Is the Sun exceptional? After centuries of geocentric and heliocentric worldviews we find this a difficult proposition to entertain. But perhaps the Sun is a member of a small class of late-type stars with large amplitudes in their X-ray cycles. The stellar X-ray observations listed in the HEASARC catalog are too sparse to verify this hypothesis.

To resolve these and related questions we have proposed a small low-cost stellar X-ray spectroscopic imager originally called SADE to obtain regular time series from late and early-type stars and accretion disks. This instrument is complimentary to the much more advanced Chandra and XMM-Newton observatories, and allows them to focus on those sources that require their full spatial and spectral resolution. We will describe the basic design and spectroscopic capability of SADE and show it meets the mission requirements.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: martens@physics.montana.edu

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