Browsing by Subject "Flares"

Flares are short, high-energy magnetic events on stars, including the Sun. Observations of young stars and red dwarfs regularly show the occurrence of flare events multiple orders of magnitude more energetic than even the fiercest solar storms ever recorded. As our technology remains vulnerable to disruptions due to space weather, the study of flares and other stellar magnetic activity is crucial. Until recently, the detection of extrasolar flares has required much manual work and observation resources. This work presents a mostly automatic pipeline to detect and estimate the energies of extrasolar flare events from optical light curves. To model and remove the star's background radiation in spite of complex periodicity, short windows of nonlinear support vector regression are used to form a multi-model consensus. Outliers above the background are flagged as likely flare events, and a template model is fitted to the flux residual to estimate the energy. This approach is tested on light curves collected from the stars AB Doradus and EK Draconis by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and dozens of flare events are found. The results are consistent with recent literature, and the method is generalizable for further observations with different telescopes and different stars. Challenges remain regarding edge cases, uncertainties, and reliance on user input.