Michele Silverstein
Naval Research Laboratory
Magnetic Radio Bursts from an Ultracool Dwarf Binary Detected using VLITE
Magnetically driven phenomena such as flaring events, aurorae, and star-planet interaction lead ultracool dwarfs to emit in radio frequencies. Despite decades of scrutiny, a comprehensive physical understanding of their radio emission at different frequencies, timescales, polarization, and coherence remains elusive, spurring on additional study of these complex objects. The VLA Low-band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (VLITE) is a commensal survey attached to the Very Large Array, operating at 340 MHz. This frequency regime is relatively unprobed in ultracool dwarf studies. Because VLITE takes observations simultaneous with VLA observations, the survey spans the majority of the sky north of Dec = - 40 deg, with coverage ranging from 30 seconds to 8 hours. Here I highlight emission discovered from an ultracool dwarf binary on the timescale of hours, demonstrating the potential of the VLITE system and kicking off a larger survey of thousands of fully convective M dwarfs in the solar neighborhood.