The Solar-like Latitudinal Distribution of Flaring Activities Revealed by TESS, APOGEE, and GALAH

Abstract Flare flux reflects the contribution from active regions rather than the contribution from the entire hemisphere of a star. Unlike the amplitude of light curves caused by starspots, flare detection is independent of inclination. The two valuable properties of flares can be used to reveal the latitudinal distribution of active regions (LaDAR), given that LaDAR is coupled with inclination and location information in spatially unresolved stars. We detected ∼27,000 flares of 1510 flaring stars in the TESS mission with the corresponding inclinations obtained. The detection rate of flaring stars shows that flares are hard to detect on stars with low inclination, indicating that flares mainly occur at low latitudes. Further investigation of the relationship between the apparent flaring activity and inclination, along with the rotation period, finds that as the rotation period increases from a solar-like rotation to an ultrafast rotation, the mean latitude of active regions increases from θ ≈ 15 ∘ to θ ≈ 27 ∘ , whose trend is in line with the rotation–activity relationship. The LaDAR indicates that flares are attributed to small-scale fields that are formed at low latitudes, while polar spots that are associated with large-scale fields are inactive, making it difficult for them to trigger flares.