Science Programme

The scientific direction of Mauve is driven by its research community, and participating scientists shape the mission’s goals and observational strategies, ensuring the possibility for high-risk and high-reward science. Thousands of observational hours will be dedicated to each year of the programme, with many stars continuously available within Mauve’s wide field of regard, enabling long baseline observations and unlocking a significant time domain astronomy opportunity. Mauve’s wide field of regard covers the entire ecliptic plane and parts of the galactic plane, including the centre, and enables extended observation campaigns to support in-depth studies of stellar variability.

The programme will support a rich and diverse set of research themes, showcasing the mission’s wide potential and the creativity of our community. Regular data releases will be made to all members throughout the mission lifetime, with the Blue Skies Space team providing full-time support to assist in the provision and exploitation of the data.

Science Areas

Flare Monitoring

Flaring stars are often associated with high stellar magnetic activity and their impact on exo-systems’ space weather is still under debate. However, their nature and physical properties are poorly understood due to a shortage of data.

Mauve will obtain light curves and spectra for thousands of flares, super-flares, and megaflares across its ultraviolet and visible wavelength ranges. This will provide valuable insights on flare energy distribution, UV flare statistics and the UV-visible flare energy ratio. This data will be used as inputs for flare models, astrobiological irradiation experiments, and photochemical models.

Flare Evolution

Long-duration and repeat observations of stars are crucial to understanding flare frequency and evolution through time.

Mauve’s short-cadence observations will unlock the amplitude duration and integration area of the flare, enabling the measurement of the flare peak time, t_1/2 flare duration proxy, and equivalent duration, shown to be correlated with the stellar parameters. Exploring flares on dwarfs and giants, Mauve will expand our knowledge of flare evolution on a large variety of stars via a homogeneous database.

Exoplanet Hosts

Improving our knowledge of the physical properties of exoplanets requires studies of chemical abundances and magnetic activity of the host star.

Through time-domain astronomy, Mauve will monitor the magnetic activity of exoplanet hosts, revealing the effects of stellar UV radiation on photochemistry. Mauve’s wide wavelength range is not only sensitive to photochemistry and magnetic heating processes in NUV, but covers the entire UVC, UVB, and UVA regimes (200-400 nm) which would act as empirical, indispensable data for assessing exoplanet habitability.

Chromospheric Activity

The stellar chromospheric activity in shorter wavelengths is not well understood due to a shortage of data. Stellar models are not yet capable of predicting the UV, EUV, and X-ray emission of stars accurately.

Mauve will provide the UV part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is sensitive to temperature and the composition of a star’s outer layers. Using long baseline observations, Mauve will reveal the processes occurring in a star’s atmosphere, such as the presence of hot spots, magnetic activity, and changes in temperature.

Binary Systems

Continuous monitoring of evolved tidally locked binaries that show strong magnetic activity and flux variability in the UV regime is of great importance.

Collecting a spectral database of these systems provides information on stellar evolution, stellar parameters, mass determination, period-luminosity relationships, activity, and aids in exoplanet detection. Binary star systems also offer a unique opportunity to study the effects of stellar interactions and mass transfer, significantly influencing their evolution, leading to phenomena such as accretion and flares. Additional variability of these systems due to changes in the mass transfer rate or the geometry of the accretion process can be measured by Mauve’s continuous, well-calibrated spectra.