Exploring flaring activity as an age indicator using open cluster data

The presence and strength of stellar magnetic activity is rooted in a star's fundamental parameters such as mass and age. Age-resolved investigations of chromospheric activity indicators, and large scale magnetic field observations suggest that one can access an individual star's age via its magnetic activity. Can flares, magnetically driven energetic outbursts of energy on the surfaces of stars, serve as an accurate stellar clock" then? For a star with given mass, the probability to encounter a flare scales as a power law with its total released energy. If there is an activity-age relation in the form of a flaring-age relation we expect the observed flaring rates and energies to vary significantly in these objects. Thus, the slope and intercept of the power law fit to the flare frequency distribution would be a function of both mass and age. The Kepler mission provides the means to test this hypothesis - high precision time domain photometry of thousands of stars in more than 10 open clusters spanning a wide range of ages. Using Kepler's K2 Campaigns 4 and 5 we explore the possibility to calibrate such a clock on the example of three open clusters: M67 (4.3 Gyr), M44 (0.63 Gyr) and the Pleiades (0.125 Gyr), and present first results.