Poster Abstracts

Name/Affiliation:  Suzanne Hawley (University of Washington)

Title:  The Kepler View of Flares on Low Mass Stars

Abstract:
We report on our short cadence Kepler programs to monitor M dwarfs for flares. New flare frequency distributions are presented and the flare rates between active and inactive stars are compared. The timing distirbution of flares, and correlation with starspot phase, is also examined. The morphology of a typical flare light curve is analyzed in detail, and the various features are connected to physical properties of flare emission that have been inferred from previous ground-based spectroscopic and photometric data. One of our targets is a binary M dwarf and we use a novel technique to separate the two light curves and determine the flare frequency distribution on each star.