• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Chemistry

Rare ‘superflares’ could one day threaten Earth

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
June 11, 2019
in Chemistry
Reading Time: 3 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Astronomers probing the edges of the Milky Way have in recent years observed some of the most brilliant pyrotechnic displays in the galaxy: superflares.

These events occur when stars, for reasons that scientists still don’t understand, eject huge bursts of energy that can be seen from hundreds of light years away. Until recently, researchers assumed that such explosions occurred mostly on stars that, unlike Earth’s, were young and active.

Now, new research shows with more confidence than ever before that superflares can occur on older, quieter stars like our own–albeit more rarely, or about once every few thousand years.

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

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.

Notsu presented his research at a press briefing at the 234th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis.

“Our study shows that superflares are rare events,” said Notsu, a researcher in CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “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 an unlikely source: the Kepler Space Telescope. The NASA spacecraft, launched in 2009, seeks out planets circling stars far from Earth. But it also found something odd about those stars themselves. In rare events, the light from distant stars seemed to get suddenly, and momentarily, brighter.

Researchers dubbed those humungous bursts of energy “superflares.”

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.

And that raised an obvious question: Could a superflare also occur on our own sun?

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

To find out, Notsu and an international team of researchers turned to data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft and from the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Over a series of studies, the group used those instruments to narrow down a list of superflares that had come from 43 stars that resembled our sun. The researchers then subjected those rare events to a rigorous statistical analysis.

The bottom line: age matters. Based on the team’s calculations, 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.”

The group published its latest results in May in The Astrophysical Journal.

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.”

###

Co-authors on the recent study include researchers from Kyoto University, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, University of Hyogo, University of Washington and Leiden University.

Media Contact
Daniel Strain
[email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab14e6

Tags: AstronomyAstrophysicsPlanets/MoonsSpace/Planetary ScienceStars/The Sun
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

JUNO Successfully Completes Liquid Filling and Commences Data Acquisition

JUNO Successfully Completes Liquid Filling and Commences Data Acquisition

August 26, 2025
Durable and Flexible Porous Crystals Showcase Exceptional Gas Sorption Capabilities

Durable and Flexible Porous Crystals Showcase Exceptional Gas Sorption Capabilities

August 25, 2025

Rice’s Martí, Sarlah, and Wang Receive National American Chemical Society Honors

August 25, 2025

Molecular Compound Enables Photoinduced Double Charge Accumulation

August 25, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • blank

    Breakthrough in Computer Hardware Advances Solves Complex Optimization Challenges

    146 shares
    Share 58 Tweet 37
  • Molecules in Focus: Capturing the Timeless Dance of Particles

    142 shares
    Share 57 Tweet 36
  • New Drug Formulation Transforms Intravenous Treatments into Rapid Injections

    115 shares
    Share 46 Tweet 29
  • Neuropsychiatric Risks Linked to COVID-19 Revealed

    81 shares
    Share 32 Tweet 20

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Novel Stress-Release Technique Enables Flexible Al2O3 OLED Films

Engineering Anisotropic Structures in Living Tissues

Tackling Public Health Challenges in Local Governance: Norway’s Experience

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.