Light Echoes of Time-resolved Flares and Application to Kepler Data

Light echoes of stellar flares provide an intriguing option for exploring protoplanetary disks in young stellar systems. Previous work on light echoes of circumstellar disks made use of delta-function flares for modeling. We present a new model that incorporates echoes produced by extended, time-resolved flares. We then test this model on known disk-bearing stars with Kepler K2 data by estimating disk parameters from possible echo signals. We focus on two stars; the first appears to be a good candidate for use of this echo model, which predicts disk parameters that are consistent with known values. The second star turns out to be more problematic as a result of high brightness variability in its post-peak lightcurve. These two cases show both the promise and limitations of light echoes as a tool for exploring protoplanetary disks in the time domain