Talk

At a gallop: stellar flares from Kepler/K2 and TESS

Ekaterina Ilin, Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP)

In low-mass stars, stellar rotation and flaring activity are closely linked through the stellar dynamo. The Kepler, K2, and TESS missions have captured signatures of thousands of flares. Their signal was found on all stars from solar analogs to ultra-cool dwarfs, and at all ages from pre-main sequence to early post-main sequence. This new wealth of data enables us to investigate the statistical properties of flaring activity. Such studies can inform our reasoning about the evolution of stellar magnetic fields not only in the highly active specimen but also in the bulk stellar population in the Solar neighborhood. In this talk, we introduce AltaiPony, a handy Python tool for fast automatic scanning of Kepler and TESS light curves for flares. We show how its injection-recovery feature can be used to improve the analysis of flare frequency distributions, and present examples of recent work.