Poster Abstracts - Kepler - NASA

POSTER ABSTRACTSP0705. POSTER SESSION IITHE FLARING ACTIVITY OF THE M DWARF GJ 1243. S. L. Hawley 1 , J. R. A. Davenport 1 , A. F. Kowalski1 , E. J. Hilton 2 , J. P. Wisniewski 1 , A. Brown 3 , L. Walkowicz 4 , 1 Astronomy Department, Box 351580, Universityof Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, slh@astro.washington.edu, jrad@astro.washington.edu, kowalski@astro.washington.edu,wisniewski@astro.washington.edu, 2 University of Hawaii, hilton@ifa.hawaii.edu,3 University of Colorado, alexander.brown@colorado.edu, 4 Princeton University, lucianne@astro.princeton.eduAbstract: We analyze high time resolution (oneminute cadence) data from our Kepler Cycle 2 GOprogram to investigate flares on the active M dwarfGJ 1243. In our preliminary analysis for one monthof data (shown in Figure 1), we find a significantperiodic variation in the light curve, as well as morethan 270 flares. Neither the flare energy nor thenumber of flares appears to correlate with the phaseof the 0.6 day periodic variation. We will presentfurther results that incorporate the second month ofKepler data and our ground-based followup spectroscopyusing the ARC 3.5m telescope at Apache PointObservatory. We will also discuss the flare frequencydistribution for the GJ 1243 Kepler data and comparewith ground-based data for similar stars. Finally,we will describe our analysis of the variabilitystructure function for the Kepler data.Figure 1: Top panel – the phase folded light curve forone month of 1-minute cadence Kepler data on GJ1243. The periodic variation is evident, as are theflare excursions. Flare energies (middle panel) andnumber of flares (bottom panel) show no obviouscorrelation with phase.1882011 Kepler Science Conference - NASA Ames Research Center