The coronal X-ray - age relation and its implications for the evaporation of exoplanets

TL;DR

This study explores the relationship between stellar coronal X-ray emission and age across different spectral types, and applies this to understand the evaporation and survival of transiting exoplanets over time.

Contribution

It provides new X-ray emission-age relations for late-type stars and applies these to model exoplanet evaporation, revealing the significance of early stellar activity on planetary mass loss.

Findings

X-ray to bolometric luminosity ratio decreases with earlier spectral types.

Approximately 10% of known transiting exoplanets may have lost over 5% of their mass due to evaporation.

Most planetary evaporation occurs within the first Gyr of stellar evolution.

Abstract

We study the relationship between coronal X-ray emission and stellar age for late-type stars, and the variation of this relationship with spectral type. We select 717 stars from 13 open clusters and find that the ratio of X-ray to bolometric luminosity during the saturated phase of coronal emission decreases from 10^-3.1 for late K-dwarfs to 10^-4.3 for early F-type stars (across the range 0.29<(B-V)_0<1.41). Our determined saturation timescales vary between 10^7.6 and 10^8.3 years, though with no clear trend across the whole FGK range. We apply our X-ray emission - age relations to the investigation of the evaporation history of 121 known transiting exoplanets using a simple energy-limited model of evaporation and taking into consideration Roche lobe effects and different heating/evaporation efficiencies. We confirm that a linear cut-off of the planet distribution in the M^2/R^3 versus a^-2 plane is an expected result of population modification by evaporation and that the known transiting exoplanets display such a cut-off. We find that for an evaporation efficiency of 25% we expect around 1 in 10 of the known transiting exoplanets to have lost > 5% of their mass since formation. In addition we provide estimates of the minimum formation mass for which a planet could be expected to survive for 4 Gyrs for a range of stellar and planetary parameters. We emphasise the importance of the earliest periods of a planet's life for its evaporation history with 75% expected to occur within the first Gyr. This raises the possibility of using evaporation histories to distinguish between different migration scenarios. For planets with available spin-orbit angles no difference is found between the distributions of planets with misaligned orbits and those with aligned orbits. This suggests that misalignment occurs early in the life of the planetary system, though more data is needed.