WHITE-LIGHT FLARES ON COOL STARS IN THE KEPLER QUARTER 1 DATA

By Lucianne M. Walkowicz, G. Basri, N. Batalha, R. Gilliland, Jon M. Jenkins, William J. Borucki, D. Koch, Douglas A. Caldwell, A. Dupree, D. Latham and 4 more. 2010

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We present the results of a search for white-light flares on ∼23,000 cool dwarfs in the Kepler Quarter 1 long cadence data. We have identified 373 flaring stars, some of which flare multiple times during the observation period. We calculate relative flare energies, flare rates, and durations and compare these with the quiescent photometric variability of our sample. We find that M dwarfs tend to flare more frequently but for shorter durations than K dwarfs and that they emit more energy relative to their quiescent luminosity in a given flare than K dwarfs. Stars that are more photometrically variable in quiescence tend to emit relatively more energy during flares, but variability is only weakly correlated with flare frequency. We estimate distances for our sample of flare stars and find that the flaring fraction agrees well with other observations of flare statistics for stars within 300 pc above the Galactic plane. These observations provide a more rounded view of stellar flares by sampling stars that have not been pre-selected by their activity, and are informative for understanding the influence of these flares on planetary habitability.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/377979bd51264d6fe1eaff4ecf72361d3edb56e9

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Citations in the corpus

THE KEPLER CATALOG OF STELLAR FLARES (2016, background): “The population statistics explored in the following sections were not strongly affected by this cut, but several known dwarf flare stars from Walkowicz et al. (2011) were erroneously tagged as giants and removed.”
KEPLER FLARES. I. ACTIVE AND INACTIVE M DWARFS (2014, background): “…flare light curves, since many flares on M dwarfs have a duration shorter than 30 minutes (e.g. Moffett 1974) and nearly all are shorter than the 90 minutes (3 observations of 30 minutes each) required in e.g. the Walkowicz et al. (2011) discussion of stellar flares in Kepler long cadence data.”
TIME-RESOLVED PROPERTIES AND GLOBAL TRENDS IN dMe FLARES FROM SIMULTANEOUS PHOTOMETRY AND SPECTRA (2013, background): “Values of X for the white-light emission are often calculated in the literature (van den Oord et al. 1996; Hawley et al. 2003; Kowalski et al. 2010; Osten et al. 2010; Walkowicz et al. 2011; Davenport et al. 2012).”
KEPLER FLARES. II. THE TEMPORAL MORPHOLOGY OF WHITE-LIGHT FLARES ON GJ 1243 (2014, background): “A generic exponential decay with time is frequently assumed in searches for flares in large catalogs (Walkowicz et al. 2011; Parke Loyd & France 2014).”
THE ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION ENVIRONMENT AROUND M DWARF EXOPLANET HOST STARS (2012, background): “M dwarfs display variability on many timescales and flare activity occurs with greater frequency and amplitude than on main-sequence G and K dwarfs (Hawley et al. 1996; West et al. 2004; Welsh et al. 2007; Walkowicz et al. 2011).”
Quasi-periodic Pulsations in Solar and Stellar Flares: An Overview of Recent Results (Invited Review) (2016, methodology): “This was recently made prominent by the use of Kepler data (Walkowicz et al., 2011; Maehara et al., 2012; Balona, 2012; Shibayama et al., 2013; Candelaresi et al., 2014).”
Stellar Flares from the First TESS Data Release: Exploring a New Sample of M Dwarfs (2019, methodology): “Extensive catalogs of stellar flares from Kepler were provided by, e.g., Walkowicz et al. (2011), Hawley et al. (2014), Davenport (2016) and Van Doorsselaere et al. (2017).”
25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics (2014, background): “…and Brown 1999; Audard et al. 1999, 2000; Kashyap et al. 2002; Güdel et al. 2003; Arzner et al. 2007), the X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM) or Newton (Stelzer et al. 2007), and most recently with the surveys of the Kepler mission (Walkowicz et al. 2011; Maehara et al. 2012; Shibayama et al. 2013).”
SUPERFLARES ON SOLAR-TYPE STARS OBSERVED WITH KEPLER. I. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF SUPERFLARES (2013, background): “There are various flare detection algorithms which detect flares from light curves (Osten et al. 2012; Walkowicz et al. 2011).”