Astronomers have learned over the past decade that even large solar flares — powerful bursts of radiation — from our Sun are actually small potatoes compared to some of the flares we see around other stars. It’s now common to spot “superflares” hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than the Sun’s flares from stars hundreds of light-years away. Earlier this year, researchers even identified a star that emitted a turbocharged flare some 10 billion times more energetic than those typically seen bursting from the Sun.
These superflares are mainly observed in young, active stars. But new research presented Monday at the 234th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis shows that even our middle-aged, relatively docile Sun is capable of producing some astoundingly powerful flares — albeit only once every one to two millennia. The work was also published May 3 in The Astrophysical Journal.
