A Dedicated System for Coordinated Radio and Optical Monitoring of the Space Weather of Young, Solar-type Stars

Low-frequency radio emission in the form of type II and III bursts is a direct indicator of plasma motion in the solar corona and interplanetary medium. However, detecting equivalent events on solar analogs requires thousands of observing hours and complementary multiwavelength observations to constrain the origin of the radio emission. To address this, we have begun the Study of Space Weather Around Young Suns (SWAYS), a multiwavelength program for monitoring space weather around young, solar-type stars. This program currently focuses on five solar-type stars spanning 100-800 Myr in age. It includes a dedicated observing scheme from the recently upgraded Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) Long Wavelength Array (LWA) operating at 13-86 MHz to search for stellar analogs of solar type II and III bursts. We have built the optical photometry instrument Flarescope to operate simultaneously with OVRO-LWA observations to investigate whether radio bursts are accompanied by magnetic reconnection events. We analyze the performance based on a 1 hr observation of π1 UMa, which shows that Flarescope can reach submillimagnitude precision through nondifferential photometry on π1 UMa in 60 s integration times when diffusing the light with engineered diffusers. A small field of OVRO-LWA cross-correlated data centered on π1 UMa reaches a noise level of 740 mJy at 10 s integration time, consistent with confusion noise. With this precision, we should be able to detect large optical flares and related radio bursts that may indicate accompanying coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events. In this paper, we present the design, framework, and performance of the SWAYS program.