Flares and flashes: The future

Abstract

I would like to thank the participants in this round-table discussion for their contributions and insights. Clearly, there are regions of overlap between the variable star observers and those looking for counterparts to GRBs. The experiments that search for counterparts to GRBs, independent of energy, have been designed to look for variability in celestial sources, and thus are “tuned” to the characteristics of “flare” and “flash” sources: these experiments may be able to contribute to the understanding of variable stars of many classes. In particular, the wide-field experiments described here should be able to provide information about the rate of rare, high-amplitude flares.

There are other areas of overlap between flare stars and GRBs which have only been touched upon briefly in this discussion by J. Greiner. When addressing the flare star topic from the GRB point of view, one would like to know answers on the following questions and unsolved problems: (1) Is it possible that flare stars are responsible for a fraction of the detected GRBs? (2) Flare star theory predicts hard X-rays as the primary emission, but no positive detections have been made to date despite first correlations of monitoring X-ray data and strong, known flare events. (3) Can a flare star make MeV photons? (4) Is there a maximum energy which a flare star can release, either optical or bolometric? Perhaps this is a situation where two seemingly unrelated phenomena truly do have a common source, and perhaps, in time, we will be able to determine the link between the two.