Most flares on the Sun occur at random, but there is a small percentage of "sympathetic flaring" -- the triggering of one flare by another. Previously there had been no widespread confirmation of sympathetic flares on other stars. In this work, we developed a new flare detection algorithm that is sensitive to closely-separated and overlapping stellar flares. We applied it to TESS data and discovered ~ 220,000 flares on ~ 16,000 stars, the majority of which are M-dwarfs. The wait time distribution between flares demonstrates an excess of closely-separated flares, relative to expectations from a Poisson process. We attribute this to sympathetic flares, occurring at a rate of between 4% and 9%, which matches the rate seen on the Sun. Our result is the first statistically robust detection of sympathetic flares on other stars, demonstrating a commonality between the Sun and low-mass stars.
@article{arxiv.2602.20311,
title = {Evidence for Sympathetic Flaring in TESS Data},
author = {Veronica Pratt and Jason R. Reeves and David V. Martin and Andy B. Zhang and Andrew Korkus and S. Edelman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20311},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
13 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ