Hundreds of "Superflares" Spotted in Sun-Like Stars

Credit: Hiroyuki Maehara (Kwasan and Hida Observatories, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)

Whenever a big solar storm appears, it necessarily comes with the looming threat that the Big One, aimed at our planet in just the right way, could overload the power grid and generally set civilization back a few centuries. While we should be thankful that hasn't happened, we should also be thankful that our sun doesn't seem as temperamental as some similar stars.

A study out today in Nature reveals hundreds of "superflares" from stars the same class as the sun. These flares can be thousands or even millions of times more energetic than the largest recorded one to strike Earth, the 1859 Carrington event that wreaked havoc with telegraph systems. The planet-hunting Kepler telescope spotted the huge events. While staring at a field of space for about four months, Kepler saw 83,000 stars of the same class as the sun, and saw a total of 365 superflares, which came from 148 of the stars.

Most of those major events happened in stars spinning much more quickly than the sun; those stars rotate in a period of about 10 days, while the sun takes about a month. Just 101 of the 365 superflares Kepler saw came from slower-rotating stars.

What scientists are wondering now is: Why do these big eruptions happen? Since superflares are clearly possible in stars of similar age and size to the sun, and such a superflare would be a catastrophe for human civilization, it's kind of an important question. According to Nature, the prevailing idea was that the stars' interactions with hot Jupiters (nearby big gaseous planets) caused the flares. But none of the stars in the Kepler study appeared to have such a planet.

While that mystery remains, the good news is that there's no evidence of recent superflares from the sun, MSNBC says, and it's unlikely there's been on in the past billion years. So, hopefully, our star is settling down into a more restive middle age.

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