Study suggests our sun could trigger long-awaited catastrophic super-flare this century

In a word: If you thought being hit by a massive solar flare from our sun was a freak event, there’s some bad news. New research suggests that killer super-rashes might actually be much more common than we previously thought.

Superflares are intense solar storms up to 10,000 times more powerful than regular flares that release intense electromagnetic radiation and energetic particles into space. This radiation can fry electronic devices, wipe out data servers, and send satellites crashing back to Earth. While their effects may not have been as profound a century or so ago, they could prove devastating in a modern world that runs primarily on these technologies.

The study, led by astronomers at the Max Planck Institute and published in the journal Science, looked at more than 56,000 sun-like stars observed by NASA’s Kepler telescope between 2009 and 2013. During this window , they identified a staggering 2,889 superflares from 2,527 of these stars.

Previously, estimates based on more limited samples suggested that our type of star might only emit one of these flares every few thousand years. But this new, more complete analysis indicates that Sun-like stars probably experience them about once per century on average.

Why this sudden and dramatic jump in the frequency of super-flares projected for our sun? The researchers attribute it to overcoming the biases of previous studies that excluded many Sun-like stars by only considering those with rotation periods similar to our star.

“We used a new reflection detection method developed by our group to identify the sources of reflections in light curves and images with sub-pixel resolution, taking into account instrumental effects,” explained Valeriy Vasilyev, the doctoral student Max Planck who led the work, at Live Science. .

The potential implications for Earth are concerning. The infamous Carrington Event of 1859, one of the most powerful solar storms in recent history, already released energy equivalent to 10 billion single-megaton nuclear bombs when it struck our planet.

Of course, the new study doesn’t prove that our sun will trigger such an extreme event any time soon. Questions still remain open, such as potential differences between observed blazing stars and conditions on our own sun. The first is that 30% of these blazing stars exist in binary pairs that can trigger superflares through tidal forces – which is not applicable to our lone star.

Researchers recognize that more research is needed to determine the true risk our sun poses to Earth’s infrastructure and systems. Better space weather forecasting and monitoring, aided by future sun-observing missions like the European Space Agency’s Vigil probe scheduled for launch in 2031, could help provide more clarity.