Our sun may produce a catastrophic superflare in the near future, warns new research. A study of 56,000 sun-like stars has revealed that these stars can experience powerful superflares every century. If our sun were to follow this pattern, it could lead to devastating consequences for Earth’s technology and atmosphere.
According to Valeriy Vasilyev, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, their findings demonstrate that stars like ours can produce superflares. These events are solar megastorms thousands of times more powerful than regular solar flares, capable of causing widespread damage to electronics, data servers, and satellites.
Past studies suggested that superflares occurred once every few thousand years. However, the new study reveals that our sun could be on the verge of a similar event. The researchers attribute this increased frequency to biases in past experiments, which excluded stars with similar rotation periods to our sun.
The study used NASA’s Kepler space telescope to analyze 56,450 stars, identifying 2,889 superflares from 2,527 sun-like stars between 2009 and 2013. This is a significant increase in the frequency of devastating superflares compared to previous studies.
While the researchers are cautious, they recommend better forecasting of the sun’s activity to predict when it might produce its next extreme event. The planned launch of the European Space Agency’s Vigil probe in 2031 will aid in this endeavor.
However, some assumptions within the study remain unexplored, including possible differences between our own sun and the observed sun-like stars. Further investigation is needed to determine whether our sun is likely to produce a superflare soon.
The implications of such an event are severe, with one of the largest solar storms in recent history being the 1859 Carrington Event, which released energy equivalent to 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. If our sun were to produce a similar event, it could have disastrous consequences for Earth’s atmosphere and technological systems.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/our-sun-may-be-overdue-for-a-superflare-stronger-than-billions-of-atomic-bombs-new-research-warns