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Taf Zivave

My name is Tafadzwa, however I tend to go by Taf for the majority of the time. I am an MSc student, supervised by Peter Wheatley, in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at the University of Warwick. For my MSc project, I will be conducting a deep search into the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) data archive to discover stellar flares from very faint stars. Stellar flares are explosive phenomenons which are caused by magnetic reconnection events in the upper stellar atmosphere (e.g. Jackman et al. 2023). The interest in stellar flares stems in part from the study of their role in planet habitability, ranging from magnetic storms (Tsurutani et al. 2003) and the speculation of their effects on modern-day Earth to their possible involvement in the origin of life through pre-biotic chemistry (Jackman et al. 2021). James Jackman, a previous PhD student, has conducted multiple searches for stellar flares within the NGTS (Wheatley et al. 2018) data archive; NGTS is a ground-based wide-field exoplanet survey, which obtains full-frame images from twelve inde- pendent telescopes (Wheatley et al. 2018). Jackman et al. (2019) was able to discover an L2.5 dwarf within the NGTS data archive. Faint stars such as this L2.5 dwarf are difficult to detect in quiescence, and therefore, many surveys such as Gaia, would not have detected this star, resulting in minimal information surrounding it. The detection of the L2.5 dwarf came as a surprise since as it was not know that such late type stars can be so magnetically active and release such a large amount of energy in a flare event. The motivation of this project is to improve on the detection methods implemented by previous observations of stellar flares (see Jackman et al. 2021) to observe more flaring events from faint stars similar to the L2.5 dwarf.

Write to:

Taf Zivave,
Department of Physics,
University of Warwick,
Coventry CV4 7AL
UK
 

Contact details:

E-Mail: Taf.Zivave@warwick.ac.uk