Dust cloud lifetimes of Scallop-shell stars
Simon Daley-Yates, Moira M. Jardine, Luke Bouma

TL;DR
This study models dust cloud survival in magnetically confined prominences around rapidly rotating M-dwarfs, linking prominence dynamics to observed light-curve features and their longevity.
Contribution
It introduces a 2D magnetohydrodynamic simulation with passive dust tracers to analyze dust lifetime and prominence behavior in scallop-shell stars.
Findings
Dust content decays exponentially with a half-life of about 6 stellar rotations.
Synthetic diagnostics reproduce observed phase-locked dips in light curves.
Prominence slingshot ejections can explain the longevity of photometric features.
Abstract
We investigate the survival of dust trapped in magnetically confined cool gas clouds (or {\it prominences}) around rapidly rotating M-dwarfs exhibiting the ``scallop-shell'' light-curve morphology. Using a two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation, we extend previous coronal prominence models to include a passive tracer field to allow for a single injection of collisionally charged dust grains. The tracer evolution reveals how recurrent centrifugal breakouts--the slingshot process--remove dust and gas from the prominence while chromospheric evaporation replenishes gas from below. For our simulated star, which has , , and days, the resulting dust content decays exponentially with a minimum half-life of approximately 6 stellar rotations, representing a lower limit set by our assumption of fully coupled dust and gas…
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