Stellar detectives find suspect for incredibly powerful ‘superflares’

Our sun is known for its occasional outburst of energy called a solar flare, which can trigger space weather capable of disrupting communications and power infrastructure here on Earth.

But we should really be grateful that we doesn’t exist around a star that erupts with so-called “superflares” that can be 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than even the most powerful solar flares. A superflare emerging from the sun could potentially be catastrophic for the Earth, delivering serious damage to our planet’s atmosphere and to the lifeforms that depend upon it. Fortunately, superflares are seen around stars so far away that they are mere points of light in the sky from our perspective. 

These energetic flares appear to astronomers as a sudden and extreme brightening of those distant specks, and this has led scientists to play stellar detective on a quest to discover why some stars erupt so violently. 

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