A Renaissance in Accretion Disk Physics: Optical Space-Based Timing from Exoplanet Satellites

While X-ray satellites have been privileged for years to explore short-timescale, continuous light curves of all manner of high-energy targets, optical timing has long been hampered by the vagaries of ground-based observing. While typically long-baseline, ground-based optical light curves are beset by gaps of days, to weeks, to months, and have low photometric precision. Fortunately, the advent of high-cadence, long-baseline, very high precision space-based optical timing instruments brought on by the search for Earth-like exoplanets has provided a timely solution to this problem. I will present the challenges and rewarding results that have arisen from studies of AGN variability with the exoplanet-hunting satellites Kepler and TESS, including possible scaling relations of characteristic timescale with mass, blazar jet physics, quasi-periodic oscillations, the search for intermediate-mass black holes, and more.