Flares in the Kepler short cadence data

These flares have been discarded as contaminants in previous surveys and therefore provide an unexplored resource of flare events, in particular high-energy events from faint stars. We have measured M dwarf flare energies up to 1.5x10^35^erg, pushing the limit for flare energies measured using Kepler data.

We have used our sample to study the flaring activity of wide binaries, finding that the lower mass counterpart in a wide binary flares more often at a given energy. Of the 4430 flares detected in our original search, 298 came from a neighbouring star, a rate of 6.7+/-0.4 per cent for the Kepler short cadence light curves. We have used our sample to estimate a 5.8+/-0.1 per cent rate of false positive flare events in studies using Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite short cadence data.