Microwave emission from the coronae of late-type dwarf stars

We present VLA microwave observatios of 14 late-type dwarf and subgiant stars ad binary systems. In this extensive set of observations we detected four sources at 6 cm (chi/sup 1/ Ori, UV Cet, YY Gem, and Wolf 630AB) and found low upper limits for the remaining stars. The microwave luminosities of the nondetected F--K dwarfs are as small as 10/sup -2/ those of the dMe stars. The detected emission is slowly variable in all cases and is consistent with gyroresonant emission from thermal electrons spiralig in magnetic fields of about 300 gauss if the source sizes are as large as R/R/sub asterisk/roughly-equal3--4. This would correspond to magnetic fields that are probably in the range 10/sup 3/--10/sup 4/ gauss at the photospheric level. These photospheric field strengths are somewhat larger than have been observed so far in G--K dwarfs. An alternative mechanism is gyrosynchrotron emission from a relatively small number of electrons (only 10/sup -3/ the number of ambient electrons) with effective temperature, T/sub eff/>10/sup 8/ K. This mechanism is consistent with much smaller and presumably more realistic source sizes. Observations of YY gem dMle+dMle) at a number of phase are consistent with maximum but variable microwave flux at the samemore » phase as miximum plage and central meridian passage of a large starspot of the secondary star. If confirmed by subsequent observations, this provides the first direct evidence that the emission process is magnetic in character on dMe stars.« less