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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."
Who would have thought that there's ionized hydrogen in space doing stuff that's magnetic in nature!
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Don't be surprised to find that solar flares are actually beneficial and life giving, not threatening, unless... of course... you didn't send in your $35.
Then you will be fried like snot in a McDondalds deep fryer with the other pink boys.
Just moments of your time and a small token to start living like a God!
Tough decision, pay Bob or fry......
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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.
Thanks for putting this in perspective!
Had a good laugh.
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".
Did I mention that my name is Bob, my first Linuxoid operating system was Slackware, and I'm very definitely an ordained subgenius? Also, I used to smoke a pipe.
So send your money to me.
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(More seriously I'm reading The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. What a "Black Swan" an Earth-scouring solar flare would be! And one in 2012, too. Those pesky Mayans.
One is also seriously reminded of a Larry Niven short story, but I can't remember the name, am not at home near my bookshelves, and am way too lazy to look it up. But it all starts with the full moon rising and becoming very, very bright, signalling the sequential extinction of land/surface life as the planet rotates. How would you spend your last hours?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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
Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven. Also the name of the volume of short stories in which this story can be found. The protagonist initially assumes the sun has gone nova. I think I lost my copy to someone who borrowed it and didn't return it, which is a shame, because they're all excellent stories (IMNSHO).
If you want massive spoilers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Moon gives a brief synopsis of each of the stories in the collection.
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.
we can reasonably expect to be baked to a crisp at any given moment.
If you take it in the terms of as personal survival then its probably not significant - chances of being killed on the road, struck by lightning, or murdered are probably much higher. If you value humanity living for as long as possible or eventually reaching the stars this is probably a bumber.
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.
Very long odds since they're looking at a galaxy of billions of stars to see these.
However, it is just another candidate explanation for the Fermi Paradox. On a cosmic scale the universe is inimicable to life. Sure, you might persist long enough to evolve a bit of intelligence but sooner or later the rock that you live on is going to be physically pounded or bathed in lethal radiation.
Such an event is unlikely, but not impossible, in any of our lifetimes but it will eventually happen and the human race will still be here because nobody sees a quarterly return on investment for trying to go somewhere else.
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If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It was also collected in "All the Myriad Ways" and "N-Space". They also apparently made it into an episode of "The Outer Limits", with the script written by Larry Niven himself.