The relative emission from chromospheres and coronae: dependence on spectral type and age

Extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray emission from stellar coronae drives mass loss from exoplanet atmospheres, and ultraviolet emission from stellar chromospheres drives photochemistry in exoplanet atmospheres. Comparisons of the spectral energy distributions of host stars are, therefore, essential for understanding the evolution and habitability of exoplanets. The large number of stars observed with the MUSCLES, Mega-MUSCLES, and other recent Hubble Space Telescope observing programs has provided for the first time a large sample (79 stars) of reconstructed Ly alpha fluxes that we compare with X-ray fluxes to identify significant patterns in the relative emission from these two atmospheric regions as a function of stellar age and effective temperature. We find that as stars age on the main sequence, the emissions from their chromospheres and coronae follow a pattern in response to the amount of magnetic heating in these atmospheric layers. A single trend-line slope describes the pattern of X-ray versus Ly alpha emission for G and K dwarfs, but the different trend lines for M dwarf stars show that the Ly alpha fluxes of M stars are significantly smaller than those of warmer stars with the same X-ray flux. The X-ray and Ly alpha luminosities divided by the stellar bolometric luminosities show different patterns depending on stellar age. The L (Ly alpha)/L(bol) ratios increase smoothly to cooler stars of all ages, but theL(X)/L(bol) ratios show different trends. For older stars, the increase in coronal emission with decreasing T-eff is much steeper than that of chromospheric emission. We suggest a fundamental link between atmospheric properties and trend lines relating coronal and chromospheric heating,