Rare Extremely Powerful ‘Superflares’ Could One Day Threaten Earth

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com –“Superflares” – very strong explosions observed on stars with energies up to ten thousand times that of typical solar flares – are a phenomenon that have been frequently observed in recent years.

Until recently, researchers assumed that such explosions occurred mostly on stars that, unlike Earth’s, were young and active.

An artist's depiction of a superflare on an alien star. (Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Player)An artist’s depiction of a superflare on an alien star. (Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Player)

Now, new research shows that superflares can occur on older, quieter stars like our own.

“The results should be a wake-up call for life on our planet,” Yuta Notsu, the lead author of the study and a visiting researcher at CU Boulder, said in a press release.

If a superflare erupted from the sun, he said, Earth would likely sit in the path of a wave of high-energy radiation. Such a blast could disrupt electronics across the globe, causing widespread black outs and shorting out communication satellites in orbit.

“Our study shows that superflares are rare events,” said Notsu. “But there is some possibility that we could experience such an event in the next 100 years or so.”

Scientists first discovered this phenomenon from the Kepler Space Telescope and dubbed those bursts of energy “superflares.”

Could a superflare also occur on our own sun?

Notsu explained that normal-sized flares are common on the sun. But what the Kepler data was showing seemed to be much bigger, on the order of hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than the largest flare ever recorded with modern instruments on Earth.

“When our sun was young, it was very active because it rotated very fast and probably generated more powerful flares,” said Notsu. “But we didn’t know if such large flares occur on the modern sun with very low frequency.”

Researchers used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft and from the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and calculated that younger stars tend to produce the most superflares. But older stars like our sun, now a respectable 4.6 billion years old, aren’t off the hook.

“Young stars have superflares once every week or so,” Notsu said. “For the sun, it’s once every few thousand years on average.”

Notsu can’t be sure when the next big solar light show is due to hit Earth. But he said that it’s a matter of when, not if. Still, that could give humans time to prepare, protecting electronics on the ground and in orbit from radiation in space.

“If a superflare occurred 1,000 years ago, it was probably no big problem. People may have seen a large aurora,” Notsu said. “Now, it’s a much bigger problem because of our electronics.”

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff