Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
Mirzoyan (1976) showed that the concentration of flare stars around the center of the Pleiades cluster (Alcyone) was the same, irrespective of their proper motions. At that time, however, proper motions of only a few flare stars were known. The result was confirmed on the basis of more extensive observational material (Chavushian 1979, Mirzoyan 1983). Photographic observations of stellar flares in the general galactic field during 181 hours yielded the detection of only a single flare, i.e. the percentage of flare stars in the general galactic field is about 10% of the total number of flare stars detected in the regions of stellar clusters and associations (Chavushian 1979, Mirzoyan et al. 1988).
This result shows that flare activity can be considered as a definitive cluster membership criterion, which appears to be a better one than the cluster membership probability, which is based on proper motions. To prove this, cluster membership probabilities (Stauffer et al. 1991) for 408 Pleiades cluster flare stars from the catalogue by Haro et al. (1982), are used (Table 1).