Stellar flare detection and characterization in ZTF High-cadence light curves
Abstract
Stellar flares are brief, intense increases in brightness resulting from magnetic reconnection events in stellar atmospheres. In this paper, we have developed a pipeline to detect and characterize flares in short-duration (approximately 6.2-hour) light curves from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Extended Deep-Drilling survey. This method involves robust detrending with Tukey's biweight estimator, followed by sigma-based thresholding and visual scrutiny to identify flare candidates. It is applied to 28 million light curves, and we found 331 flaring events from 310 stars across evolutionary stages and spectral types. We estimated flare energies by assuming a blackbody emission model for 234 flares with reliable distance, and flare morphologies were classified based on flare modeling using the template by Mendoza et al.(2022). We obtained a power law correlation between energy and duration with an index of 0.19 ± 0.01. We also find similar power law correlation between the flare energy and Tdecay, Trise and FWHM. This study demonstrates the power of high-cadence ground-based surveys for statistical and morphological flare studies across a broad stellar sample.
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BibTeX
@misc{ghosh2026stellar,
title = {{Stellar flare detection and characterization in ZTF High-cadence light curves}},
author = {Aratrika Ghosh and Shravan Hanasoge and Matthew J. Graham and Ashish Mahabal},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.24335},
eprint = {2609.24335},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24335},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Stellar flare detection and characterization in ZTF High-cadence light curves
AU - Aratrika Ghosh
AU - Shravan Hanasoge
AU - Matthew J. Graham
AU - Ashish Mahabal
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.24335
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24335
AB - Stellar flares are brief, intense increases in brightness resulting from magnetic reconnection events in stellar atmospheres. In this paper, we have developed a pipeline to detect and characterize flares in short-duration (approximately 6.2-hour) light curves from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) Extended Deep-Drilling survey. This method involves robust detrending with Tukey's biweight estimator, followed by sigma-based thresholding and visual scrutiny to identify flare candidates. It is applied to 28 million light curves, and we found 331 flaring events from 310 stars across evolutionary stages and spectral types. We estimated flare energies by assuming a blackbody emission model for 234 flares with reliable distance, and flare morphologies were classified based on flare modeling using the template by Mendoza et al.(2022). We obtained a power law correlation between energy and duration with an index of 0.19 ± 0.01. We also find similar power law correlation between the flare energy and T_decay, T_rise and FWHM. This study demonstrates the power of high-cadence ground-based surveys for statistical and morphological flare studies across a broad stellar sample.
ER -