How did this little star make such a big splash?

Scientists have spotted a super-rocket larger than some of the biggest solar storms ever recorded – according to what appears to be a small star the size of Jupiter.

The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), an astronomical telescope in Chile, detected the flare for the first time on August 13, 2017. It is not only the second largest flare observed observed in the world. a star of type "L-dwarf". but it's the coolest star who has shown this kind of powerful flare to date.

The star, called ULAS J224940.13-011236.9, is an L-shaped dwarf, a red star about 250 light-years away and only 10% of the Sun's radius. It burns at a temperature of only 1,930 degrees Kelvin, around the flame temperature of a torch. Stars like this are too cold to be detected by the NGTS – until one of them lets out a gigantic torch that appears in the investigation. When this happens, researchers align the position of the flare with the list of known star positions from the Two Micron All-Sky survey, called 2MASS.

After finding the culprit star, the researchers must use a model in order to calculate the amplitude, duration and energy of the flare. They ended up with a flash that lasted nearly 10 minutes and published 3.4 * 10³³ ergs of energy. If such a surge would occur on our own Sun, it would cause a lot of power outages here on Earth.

These fascinating results are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The numbers are not accurate, of course, because they are based on modeling, which is subject to inevitable human biases. Still, a star too weak to appear on the NGTS appeared 10,000 times brighter in a flash, which is wild.

Scientists believe that such powerful eruptions occur when parts of the magnetic fields of the star with opposite orientations connect to each other. This warms the particles in the equivalent of the star's atmosphere, thus releasing the "white light" emission observed here. Other dwarf stars also undergo powerful eruptions, but none of these stars are as cool as this one.

The scientists behind the new document were excited that the NGTS study could study large eruptions on such stars and say that it could change the way we think about small stars. I'm just proud of the little guy.