KEPLER FLARES. II. THE TEMPORAL MORPHOLOGY OF WHITE-LIGHT FLARES ON GJ 1243

By James R. A. Davenport, S. Hawley, L. Hebb, J. Wisniewski, A. Kowalski, Emily C. Johnson, M. Malatesta, Jesús E. Peraza, Marcus Keil, Steven M. Silverberg and 5 more. 2014

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the largest sample of flares ever compiled for a single M dwarf, the active M4 star GJ 1243. Over 6100 individual flare events, with energies ranging from 1029 to 1033 erg, are found in 11 months of 1 minute cadence data from Kepler. This sample is unique for its completeness and dynamic range. We have developed automated tools for finding flares in short-cadence Kepler light curves, and performed extensive validation and classification of the sample by eye. From this pristine sample of flares we generate a median flare template. This template shows that two exponential cooling phases are present during the white-light flare decay, providing fundamental constraints for models of flare physics. The template is also used as a basis function to decompose complex multi-peaked flares, allowing us to study the energy distribution of these events. Only a small number of flare events are not well fit by our template. We find that complex, multi-peaked flares occur in over 80% of flares with a duration of 50 minutes or greater. The underlying distribution of flare durations for events 10 minutes and longer appears to follow a broken power law. Our results support the idea that sympathetic flaring may be responsible for some complex flare events.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd3a7456e27f6d81e90b3f04ed0f3e398d648f8d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Modelling Quasi-Periodic Pulsations in Solar and Stellar Flares (2018, methodology): “…mechanism.3 Furthermore, there has been a wealth of QPP detections in stellar flares using NASA’s Kepler mission (Borucki et al. 2010), e.g. Davenport et al. (2014) investigated the temporal morphology of white-light flares in Kepler data (Davenport 2016 complied a Kepler catalogue of…”
Frequent Flaring in the TRAPPIST-1 System—Unsuited for Life? (2017, methodology): “We fitted the event with the sum of three separate analytical flare models following the method and parametrization described in Davenport et al. (2014), shown in Fig.”
Stellar Flares from the First TESS Data Release: Exploring a New Sample of M Dwarfs (2019, methodology): “…tqdm (doi:10.5281/ zenodo.1468033), seaborn (seaborn.pydata.org/index. html), allesfitter (Günther & Daylan 2020, 2019), ellc (Maxted 2016), aflare (Davenport et al. 2014), dynesty (Speagle 2020), emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), celerite (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2017), corner (Foreman-Mackey…”
THE KEPLER CATALOG OF STELLAR FLARES (2016, methodology): “The FFD for the highly active, rapidly rotating M4 dwarf, GJ 1243, has been previously studied using Kepler data (Ramsay et al. 2013; Hawley et al. 2014; Davenport et al. 2014a).”
Optimized transit detection algorithm to search for periodic transits of small planets (2019, unknown): “An analytic description of a stellar flare (Davenport et al. 2014) could be used to search for periodically flaring stars.”