Flares and Scallops

18 Nov 2021

What are Scallops?

The late John Stauffer first showed me these stars from K2

Zahn+2019 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ApJ…876..127Z

more from Gunther 2020 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200811681G

Stauffer 2021, his last paper https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021AJ….161…60S

what are they?! Zahn have a nice model of a spotted star + a dark/opaque disk. I quite like this model.

A weird flare

Zahn+2019 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ApJ…876..127Z highlights TIC 206544316

There’s this big flare, and it stays bright… wtf?!

what if we modeled the light curve empirically w/ a GP, then fit the flare? Can we show the flare is rotating in/out of view? Is the excess brightness later due to the long tail of the flare?

Can we build a simple model?

we need a starspot model + a disk

now there’s 4 TESS Sectors worth of 2-min data, with several interesting flares. Get it all! Phase fold vs time