Alicia Aarnio

I'll be off next week to the 2009 Women in Astronomy meeting. Comments here upon my return..

In pdf format, for easier viewing.

The first presentation of the "X-2000 Project" will occur at AAS 215 in DC! Look out for my dissertation talk, entitled: "The Application of Solar Physics to Mass-Loss and Angular Momentum Evolution of Solar-type Pre-Main Sequence Stars." Session/talk number TBA.

Solar X-ray flares are classified based on their 100-800pm flux at 1AU (by GOES). Using Chandra data from very high energy flares on T Tauri stars of the Orion Nebula Cluster, I estimate the classification for these flares on the solar scale. For example, an NQ flare is of class N flare of Q*10^-P W/m^2, with the exponent P defining the class N. For X class flares, P is 4. Next are the less powerful M class flares, with an exponent of 5. To summarize, an X8 flare has a flux of 8*10^-4 W/m^2. For the highest energy flares from Chandra, flare classifications range from X200 to X40000!! One caveat exists at present for this calculation- the Chandra bandpass is wider than that of GOES, allowing us to integrate more of the lower-energy X-ray flux. This effect, however, is an order of magnitude at most. We do not see flares like this on the Sun, thankfully!

A Survey for a Coeval, Comoving Group Associated with HD 141569 appears this month in the Astronomical Journal, Vol. 136, #6. See this issue's contents here. The accepted manuscript can be accessed on arXiv here.

Surprising dissimilarities in a newly formed pair of 'identical twin' stars Keivan G. Stassun, Robert D. Mathieu, Phillip A. Cargile, Alicia N. Aarnio, Eric Stempels, and Aaron Geller. This article has been featured by the NSF, in Vanderbilt's Exploration online science magazine, as well as in Astronomy magazine. A copy of the accepted manuscript in full is on arXiv here.