Transients As Determinants Of Habitability
Stellar magnetic activity, manifested through spots (faculae and flares), fundamentally shapes the exoplanets’ environments.
For low-mass stars in particular, where most habitable-zone planets reside, the variable magnetic phenomena can dominate atmospheric chemistry, surface radiation levels, long-term atmospheric escape, and ultimately habitability.
However, physical characteristics of these transients (e.g. energy and temperature) and their spectra remain ill-constrained due to limitations in cadence and magnitude access of current spectroscopic facilities. A next-generation 12-m class ground-based observatory equipped with integral-field spectroscopy (IFS) and multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) at R∼4,000 and ∼40,000 offers a transformational opportunity to characterize stellar activity in the time domain across large samples of exoplanet host stars.
Such a facility would enable simultaneous monitoring of continuum variability, chromospheric and coronal line diagnostics, and particle-accelerated flare signatures, resolving the physics driving space weather and quantifying its impact on planetary atmospheres.
Fatemeh Zahra Majidi, Katia Biazzo, Maria Tsantaki, Amelia Bayo, Gražina Tautvaišienė, Valentin D. Ivanov, Germano Sacco, Richard I. Anderson, Avraham Binnenfeld, David Montes
Comments: Cover page plus 3 pages body according to the guidelines issued by the ESO Expanding Horizons initiative 2025 Call for White Papers
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2512.12456 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2512.12456v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.12456
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Submission history
From: Fatemeh Zahra Majidi
[v1] Sat, 13 Dec 2025 20:53:43 UTC (2,538 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12456
Astrobiology, Space Weather,
