Rare "superfluous" could one day threaten Earth / ScienceDaily

These events occur when stars, for reasons that scientists still do not understand, emit huge bursts of energy that can be seen hundreds of light years from us. Until recently, researchers have speculated that such explosions occur mainly on stars that, unlike those of Earth, were young and active.

Now, new research shows with greater confidence than ever that super-altitudes can occur on older, quieter stars like ours – though more rarely, or about every few thousand years.

The results should be a wake up call for life on our planet, said Yuta Notsu, the senior author of the study and a visiting scholar at CU Boulder.

If a super-light came from the sun, he said, the Earth would probably stay on the path of a high energy rays wave. Such an explosion could disrupt electronics around the world, causing widespread failures and a short circuit of communication satellites in orbit.

Notsu presented his research at a press conference at the 234th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis.

"Our study shows that super-magnitudes are rare events," said Notsu, a researcher at CU Boulder's Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics and Space. "But it is possible that we can live such an event in the next 100 years."

Scientists have discovered this phenomenon from an unlikely source: the Kepler Space Telescope. NASA's spacecraft, launched in 2009, is searching for planets surrounding stars far away from Earth. But he also found something amazing about these stars themselves. In rare cases, the light of distant stars seemed suddenly and momentarily brighter.

Researchers have dubbed these huge bursts of energy "superfluous".

Notsu explained that normal-sized flares are common in the sun. But what Kepler's data showed seemed to be much larger, in the order of hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than the greatest light ever recorded with modern instruments on Earth.

And this raised an obvious question: could a superflare also occur on our own sun?

"When our sun was young, it was very active because it was spinning very fast and probably generated more powerful eruptions," said Notsu, also of the National Observatory of Solar Energy in Boulder. "But we did not know if such big eruptions occur on the modern sun with a very low frequency."

To find out, Notsu and an international team of researchers used data from the Gaia spacecraft of the European Space Agency and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. In a series of studies, the group used these instruments to identify a list of super-angles from 43 stars that resembled our sun. The researchers then subjected these rare events to rigorous statistical analysis.

The bottom line: age counts. According to the team's calculations, younger stars tend to produce the most super-splinters. But older stars like our sun, now respectable, 4.6 billion years old, are not immune.

"Young stars have super-surfaces about once a week," said Notsu. "For the sun, it's on average every few thousand years."

The group released its latest results in May The astrophysical journal.

Notsu can not be sure when the next big sunlight show is to hit Earth. But he said it was a question of when, not so. This could still give humans time to prepare, protecting the electronics on the ground and orbiting radiation in the space.

"If a super-rocket was produced 1,000 years ago, it was probably not a big problem – people may have seen a great dawn," said Notsu. "Now, it's a much bigger problem because of our electronics."

Among the co-authors of the recent study are researchers from Kyoto University, Japan's National Observatory of Astronomy, the University of Hyogo, the University of Washington and the University of Leiden.