A new flare star member candidate in the Pleiades cluster

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a new flare star candidate in the Pleiades cluster, observed over several years, with characteristics consistent with cluster membership and a flare lasting about an hour.

Contribution

The study identifies a new flare star candidate in the Pleiades, providing detailed photometric analysis and confirming its likely cluster membership based on color-magnitude positioning.

Findings

Flare duration of nearly one hour with 1.08 mag amplitude in R-band.

Spectral types estimated as M1 and M2, consistent with Pleiades membership.

Location in the color-magnitude diagram aligns with cluster properties.

Abstract

We present a new flare star, which was discovered during our survey on a selected field at the edge of the Pleiades cluster. The field was observed in the period 2007 - 2010 with three different CCD-cameras at the University Observatory Jena with telescopes from 25 to 90 cm. The flare duration is almost one hour with an amplitude in the R-band of about 1.08 mag. The location of the flare star in a color-magnitude diagram is consistent with age and distance of the Pleiades. In the optical PSF of the flare star there are two 2MASS objects (unresolved in most images in the optical Jena PSF), so it is not yet known which one of them is responsible for this flare. The BVRIJHK colors yield spectral types of M1 and M2 with extinction being A_V=0.231+/-0.024 mag and A_V=0.266+/-0.020 for those two stars, consistent with the Pleiades cluster.