Stellar white-light emission reveals two types of flaring light-curve patterns

Abstract Stellar flares are sudden magnetic eruptions that release intense energy and cause detectable variations in stellar light curves. These transient events offer windows into the magnetic field dynamics, plasma behaviour and reconnection processes in active stellar regions. Despite their importance, the diversity in flare morphology and its underlying physical origins remains poorly understood. To explore this variability, we analyse 2319 white-light flares observed by Kepler, extracting a comprehensive set of 22 time- and frequency-domain features from each event. Using unsupervised clustering, we identify two distinct flare populations that are not associated with global stellar parameters such as rotation period, temperature or mass. Instead, the separation is primarily driven by differences in frequency evolution, damping persistence and local magnetic activity (LMA). Our findings demonstrate that flare light-curve morphology can be quantitatively grouped, revealing internal dynamical contrasts without reliance on host star properties. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Transferable mechanisms in the oscillatory processes of solar and stellar flares’.