Sun Superflares Can Do Some Serious Damage, And They Occur More Often Than Previously Thought
Every now and then, the sun erupts with a powerful flare that could do some serious damage. Experts don’t know how often these destructive eruptions occur, but estimates range from once a century to once a millennium.
The sun is already prone to plenty of violent activity. It is a very hot, giant star roiling with gas and plasma, so that’s to be expected. Most of this activity won’t harm us, but these rarer superflares could wreak havoc on humanity.
A new analysis of the eruption rates of more than 56,400 stars that resemble our sun has revealed that superflares occur more often than previously thought.
Based on these stars’ eruption rates, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany estimated that the sun’s superflare rate is once every 100 years.
If this is accurate, our safety could be at risk. The last type of solar event that occurred was only one percent as powerful as a superflare, and even then, it still led to a lot of chaos down on Earth. The Carrington Event took place in September 1859. It is considered the most intense geomagnetic storm in history.
The storm included a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection. It created strong auroral displays and caused electrical disruptions from Paris to Boston.
It even started fires in some telegraph stations. The coronal mass ejection was responsible for most of the damage.
If something like this were to happen today, it could cause widespread power outages since modern infrastructure is so vulnerable to geomagnetic disruptions.
It wasn’t easy for the research team to determine how often the sun produces superflares, which emit large amounts of radiation into space. There are records of ancient solar activity in tree rings that could provide some information.
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For example, the biggest sun-induced storms produced a spike in carbon-14 and nitrogen in polar ice. However, it doesn’t tell scientists everything they need to know.
So, the researchers searched for stars like our sun, G-type yellow dwarfs, to hopefully observe them flaring. They looked at the stars’ rotation rates and made sure the stars were similar in brightness and temperature to the sun. They excluded sun-like stars with rotation periods shorter than 20 days since the sun’s rotation period is 25 days.
Ultimately, the researchers collected data on a total of 56,450 sun-like stars. They observed 2,889 superflares on 2,527 stars, which comes out to a superflare rate of about once every 100 years.
Within the past 15,000 years, nine geomagnetic storm events have been more powerful than the Carrington Event.
They are known as Miyake events. They are predicted to occur about every 1,000 years. The most recent one took place in 774 C.E. Not every flare seemed to be accompanied by a coronal mass ejection.
“It is unclear whether gigantic flares are always accompanied by coronal mass ejections and what is the relationship between superflares and extreme solar particle events,” said Ilya Usoskin, an astrophysicist from the University of Oulu in Finland.
“This requires further investigation.”
The research was published in Science.
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