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Description
We study the relationship between coronal X-ray emission and stellar age for late-type stars, and the variation of this relationship with spectral type. We select 717 stars from 13 open clusters and find that the ratio of X-ray to bolometric luminosity during the saturated phase of coronal emission decreases from 10^-3.1^ for late K-dwarfs to 10^-4.3^ for early F-type stars (across the range 0.29<(B-V)_0_<1.41). Our determined saturation timescales vary between 10^7.6^ and 10^8.3^ years, though with no clear trend across the whole FGK range. We apply our X-ray emission - age relations to the investigation of the evaporation history of 121 known transiting exoplanets using a simple energy -limited model of evaporation and taking into consideration Roche lobe effects and different heating/evaporation efficiencies. We confirm that a linear cut-off of the planet distribution in the M^2^/R^3^ versus a^-2^ plane is an expected result of population modification by evaporation and that the known transiting exoplanets display such a cut-off. We find that for an evaporation efficiency of 25 percent we expect around 1 in 5 of the known transiting exoplanets to have lost >10 percent of their mass since formation. In addition we provide estimates of the minimum formation mass for which a planet could be expected to survive for 4Gyrs for a range of stellar and planetary parameters. We emphasise the importance of the earliest periods of a planet's life for its evaporation history with 75 percent expect to occur within the first Gyr. This raises the possibility of using evaporation histories to distinguish different migration mechanisms. For planets with spin-orbit angles available from measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect no difference is found between the distributions of planets with misaligned orbits and those with aligned orbits. This suggests that dynamical effects accounting for misalignment occur early in the life of a planetary system, although additional data is required to test this.
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