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Superflares Found On Sun-Like Stars
astroengine writes "Scientists have found superflares more than 1 million times more powerful than flares generated by the sun occurring on sun-like stars being studied by NASA's Kepler space telescope. The finding, culled from 120 days of observations of 83,000 stars, is the first to detail how often and how energetic flares on other stars can be. The discovery, however, raises a question about how the massive outbursts, believed to be caused by complex magnetic interactions, can physically occur."
we can reasonably expect to be baked to a crisp at any given moment.
Also raises the question of whether one might somehow randomly occur here...
Who would have thought that there's ionized hydrogen in space doing stuff that's magnetic in nature!
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MorningLightMountain is hard at work eradicating other species.
Considering that the Kepler mission was hoping to catch quite a few so-called "hot-jupiters" in transit and apparently none have seemingly appeared around stars that have superflares, perhaps something about the superflares are keeping hot-jupiters from migrating close to their central stars or maybe these potential hot-jupiters migrated a bit too close to these stars and all we are seeing are the superflare "burps" after the star fried (or ate) those potential "hot-jupiters"...
We deploy a new instrument and are puzzled and amazed at the results. This is incredibly wonderful, but shows how little we know about the universe. It seems to happen every time we deploy a new instrument. So much to know! So much to learn!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Actually, the super solar flare was in the second book of the series, "Sunstorm". It's not giving much away to say that it wasn't an accident, either. Just finished the series last week.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
called this one back around 1970 in his classic story "Inconsistent Moon".
I remember when it was only $3. Of course, that was back before Bob's first prophecy of X day, so no wonder it's gone up now he's got a proven track record of failure behind him.
(heh, who do you think it was put the bit of paper in his hands the wrong way up in the first place? I'll give you a clue: if he'd held it the other way up, it would have read "kallisti"!)
so we just need a stargate near to time travel with them.
1 out of 75 stars? Seems high. Those stars must have a different environment than our sun (or at least I hope so).
365 stars experience a superflare in a 120 day span. Times 3 to extrapolate to 1 year... = 1095 stars
83000/1095 = 75
You realize, of course, that we're really only seeing half of the flares. That's because we can only see the ones that happen to be facing us. It's just like with pulsars: there's undoubtedly a lot of them out there that we'll never detect simply because we're not in the path of their output.
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Assume that the Many Worlds interpretation is true. In this case, what's to stop our Sun from being a superflare star, flaring on average every seventy five years or so? This would mean that our world and everything we know of the benign nature of the local stellar environment is just an artifact of our survival along an extremely low-probability path of the tree of all possibilities describing the existence of the earth in some approximately life-friendly form.
In effect, we're living in an instance. Reality isn't quite so friendly, taken as a whole.
Sun like stars, what composition are they, their ages, binary systems etc.
I would be curious if they could say what their rotational speeds were compared to our Sun, if these super flare stars have high rotational speeds it could provide enough twisting to create these.
The hot planet theory would mean the mass of the planet had to be high enough and the distance close enough that the gravity center was inside the star to stir it up enough I would think. The idea that some teleconnection or alignment could cause these to flare is okay, but another possibility is that a rocky planet with a mass of jupiter could be inside the flare as well hence not seeing it, or it's speed and the timing of the flare means it's gone around by the time the flare explodes.
Yeah,
I wager rotation speed lies behind this. Even if it is possible to see the surface speeds using Doppler spectrum spreading or something, maybe the cores can rotate even faster? A high rotation speed could also be indicative of a different early formation history making the likeliness of close Jupiters small. Another explanation could be that these suns have indeed had close gas giants in the past which now has long crashed into the sun and thereby increased the spin.
RTFA
Scientists previously theorized a close-flying Jupiter-sized planet would be needed to ground a super-flaring stars' magnetic fits. For the size flares our sun experiences, magnetic reconnection occurs within the sun itself, with one twisted magnetic field snapping and then linking up to another -- releasing energy in the process as a solar flare.
But the 365 superflares found by scientists crunching Kepler data need another explanation, said astrophysicist Bradley Schaefer, with Louisiana State University.
FFS
...versus Octosaurus.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Perhaps a bunch of little girls and boys will continue the human race on an alien world around the Yggdrasil after the pumpkin smashing flare of a solar origin.