 My favorite star is called GJ1243. GJ stands for two German people, Gliese and Yaris. This was star number 1243 in their catalogue. Its phone number in the Kepler input catalogue is 9726699. That's the name by which I actually know it best. This is a small star. It's about 20% the size of the sun. And it's very nearby. It's something like 12 parsecs away. 30 or 40 light years away. This little star is known as a flare star. That means it's been commonly seen to emit flares. Flares are high energy explosions that happen on the surface of the star. The sun produces flares, but they're not that big. This star pops off a flare as big as the largest flare we've ever seen on the sun. I don't know, something like once a week. It's a pretty spectacularly active object. And what's amazing is it's a typical star of its class. Why is this my favorite? Because this is the star that I spent years of my life looking at. The Kepler mission gathered almost four years of data on Gda1243, 11 months of which it stared at it with the so-called one-minute high cadence observation. So that's one image of that star every minute for 11 months straight. From that 11 months of data, we're able to study star spots, so dark regions on the surface of the star rolling in and out of view, creating sort of sinusoidal modulations in the brightness. And we see flares, lots of flares, more than 6,000 of these events. And we counted them by hand with 6,107. This is the largest number of flares ever observed for any single star except for the sun. And it's almost the same as it has been ever observed for the sun. So this is an incredible catalog of flares. And this is just one star, one average star of its class, a so-called M-type star. In total, my thesis advisor and our research group as a whole has written like five papers just on this one star and the data we collected from this one star. That's pretty good for one little star that's 20% the size of the sun. And not bad considering this was bonus science that came from the Kepler mission.