Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified:<p>Will the Sun produce a superflare?<br>Keith T. Smith, Senior Editor, Science</p><p>Vasilyev, V et al. Sun-like stars produce superflares roughly once per century. Science 386, 1301–5 (2024). 10.1126/science.adl5441</p><p>On 1 September 1859, two British amateur astronomers (Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson) independently observed a bright flash of light on the Sun. This was the first recorded solar flare, still one of the most intense known. Over the following days the associated coronal mass ejection of plasma reached Earth, producing the strongest geomagnetic storm known, dubbed the Carrington Event. The storm damaged telegraph equipment and produced intense aurorae. If a similarly strong geomagnetic storm were to occur today, it would cause power grids to fail, satellites to shut down, and other economic damage.</p><p>How often do such events occur, and how strong can they be? Solar flares have been directly observed for only a century and a half; high quality measurements weren’t possible until the Space Age, so we don’t know how the Sun behaves over multiple centuries. Astronomers therefore turn to observations of other Sun-like stars; by monitoring flares on thousands of similar stars over several years, they can infer how the Sun might behave over centuries. The challenges in these studies are automatically identifying the stellar flares, and ensuring that the target stars are sufficiently similar to the Sun.</p><p>The study by Vasilyev et al. examines brightness measurements of over 50,000 Sun-like stars, which were observed for four years by the Kepler space telescope. In all, they identified almost 3000 intense stellar flares, each with more than ten times the energy of the Carrington Event flare, which is bright enough to be considered a super flare. This implies that Sun-like stars produce superflares at an average rate of about once per century, which is substantially higher than previous estimates and I felt was an important conclusion. If the Sun behaves the same way, a superflare is overdue. But it’s also possible there are unrecognized differences between the Sun and the comparison stars.<br><a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/CarringtonEvent" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CarringtonEvent</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/SolarFlare" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SolarFlare</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/SpaceWeather" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SpaceWeather</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/space" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>space</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/science" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>science</span></a> <br>Paper: (paywall) <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl5441" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc</span><span class="invisible">e.adl5441</span></a></p>