Superflares Found On Sun-Like Stars 50
astroengine writes "Scientists have found superflares more than 1 million times more powerful than flares generated by the sun occurring on sun-like stars being studied by NASA's Kepler space telescope. The finding, culled from 120 days of observations of 83,000 stars, is the first to detail how often and how energetic flares on other stars can be. The discovery, however, raises a question about how the massive outbursts, believed to be caused by complex magnetic interactions, can physically occur."
Re:So in other words... (Score:5, Funny)
Not a problem just send in your $35 to Bob and be spared this and countless other ordeals enumerated on Slashdot daily!
http://www.subgenius.com/scatalog/membership.htm [subgenius.com]
Eternal salvation or double your money back! And that's only the beginning of what can be done with contracted consciouslessness. Websurf the luck plane!
See the overmen and pink fools as they are without x-ray specs. Own your own reality!
Don't be surprised to find that solar flares are actually beneficial and life giving, not threatening, unless... of course... you didn't send in your $35.
Then you will be fried like snot in a McDondalds deep fryer with the other pink boys.
Just moments of your time and a small token to start living like a God!
Tough decision, pay Bob or fry......
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Thanks for putting this in perspective!
Had a good laugh.
Re:So in other words... (Score:4, Interesting)
So send your money to me.
rgb
(More seriously I'm reading The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. What a "Black Swan" an Earth-scouring solar flare would be! And one in 2012, too. Those pesky Mayans.
One is also seriously reminded of a Larry Niven short story, but I can't remember the name, am not at home near my bookshelves, and am way too lazy to look it up. But it all starts with the full moon rising and becoming very, very bright, signalling the sequential extinction of land/surface life as the planet rotates. How would you spend your last hours?
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Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven. Also the name of the volume of short stories in which this story can be found. The protagonist initially assumes the sun has gone nova. I think I lost my copy to someone who borrowed it and didn't return it, which is a shame, because they're all excellent stories (IMNSHO).
If you want massive spoilers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Moon [wikipedia.org] gives a brief synopsis of each of the stories in the collection.
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Drinking, smoking,fucking, wull duh!
$35 bucks!? (Score:3, Funny)
I remember when it was only $3. Of course, that was back before Bob's first prophecy of X day, so no wonder it's gone up now he's got a proven track record of failure behind him.
(heh, who do you think it was put the bit of paper in his hands the wrong way up in the first place? I'll give you a clue: if he'd held it the other way up, it would have read "kallisti"!)
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Not failure, the napkin was upside down and the year was read wrong. 6991 July 5 is the X day prophesy.
But we all had a good time back in 96 and the sex was great. Failure? who failed?
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we can reasonably expect to be baked to a crisp at any given moment.
If you take it in the terms of as personal survival then its probably not significant - chances of being killed on the road, struck by lightning, or murdered are probably much higher. If you value humanity living for as long as possible or eventually reaching the stars this is probably a bumber.
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Very long odds since they're looking at a galaxy of billions of stars to see these.
However, it is just another candidate explanation for the Fermi Paradox. On a cosmic scale the universe is inimicable to life. Sure, you might persist long enough to evolve a bit of intelligence but sooner or later the rock that you live on is going to be physically pounded or bathed in lethal radiation.
Such an event is unlikely, but not impossible, in any of our lifetimes but it will eventually happen and the human race will
Who would have thought?!?! (Score:2, Funny)
Who would have thought that there's ionized hydrogen in space doing stuff that's magnetic in nature!
-- Typical Slashdot Know-It-All Geek
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Noooooo, can't you see it's ELECTRICAL in nature?! It's a massive cover-up by MHD supremacists! #TEACHTHECONTROVERSY
Pandora's Star (Score:4)
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It's just like everything else in life- when you run into something weird, don't poke it with a stick!
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too close for comfort (Score:3)
Considering that the Kepler mission was hoping to catch quite a few so-called "hot-jupiters" in transit and apparently none have seemingly appeared around stars that have superflares, perhaps something about the superflares are keeping hot-jupiters from migrating close to their central stars or maybe these potential hot-jupiters migrated a bit too close to these stars and all we are seeing are the superflare "burps" after the star fried (or ate) those potential "hot-jupiters"...
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Actually, as Kepler is using a transit methodology [nasa.gov] to find planets, there is nothing conclusive to say that these stars don't have large orbiting bodies. While I do accept that when looking at a large volume of stars, at least some of these should show transits by planets, but given the chances of a transit of a planet at roughly 1 AU is 0.47% [wikipedia.org], then these 365 superflares should have statistically shown one single transit event. I wouldn't consider that to be conclusive proof by any stretch. I am going to ca
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The "hot jupiters" they are talkiing about would be much, much closer than 1 AU. Being closer increases the probability of transiting, which is where they get the 10% figure.
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Statistics doesn't work that way. Stop using it that way.
That is like saying 1/3 that were in my year at school will get cancer, why hasn't anyone in my year got cancer yet?
If there was a 1/3 chance for kids in your school to get cancer this , then it would be quite surprising if none of them did get it unless your year was very small. The chance of nobody getting cancer is (2/3)^N where N is the students in your class. For large N it is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely -- and thus perfectly legitimate to ask "Why didn't anyone get cancer?" Probably because the risk factor was miscalculated.
Similarly what the GP was saying is that based on the number of events
Shows how little we know about the universe (Score:4, Interesting)
We deploy a new instrument and are puzzled and amazed at the results. This is incredibly wonderful, but shows how little we know about the universe. It seems to happen every time we deploy a new instrument. So much to know! So much to learn!
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So high, so low, so many things to know.
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Something for which I am tremendously grateful.
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Why are you posting when there's science to do. You've experiments to run. There is research to be done.
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I already ran out of cake. :(
"Time's Eye" series by Clarke and Baxter (Score:2)
Actually, the super solar flare was in the second book of the series, "Sunstorm". It's not giving much away to say that it wasn't an accident, either. Just finished the series last week.
Larry Niven (Score:2)
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"Inconstant Moon".
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called this one back around 1970 in his classic story "Inconsistent Moon".
Memory ageing detected at location... refresh recommended. (hint: check again the title. The story seems to be nice enough to recheck more than the title).
so we just need a stargate near to time travel (Score:2)
so we just need a stargate near to time travel with them.
1/75 stars per year have a superflare? (Score:1)
1 out of 75 stars? Seems high. Those stars must have a different environment than our sun (or at least I hope so).
365 stars experience a superflare in a 120 day span. Times 3 to extrapolate to 1 year... = 1095 stars
83000/1095 = 75
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I think it argues not that the stars have a different environment but that the stars themselves are not so sunlike as all that.
It calls into question something tfa didn't answer: just how sunlike are these sunlike stars? Are they about the same mass and luminosity? About the same age?
Do they rotate at the same rate?
Only half (Score:4, Insightful)
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And many times more planets not transiting stars than planets that do transit stars.
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You realize, of course, that we're really only seeing half of the flares. That's because we can only see the ones that happen to be facing us. It's just like with pulsars: there's undoubtedly a lot of them out there that we'll never detect simply because we're not in the path of their output.
Probably less than half, maybe a 1/4 to 1/3. You aren't going to see the ones on edge. It could also depend on how often we look at each star and how fast they rotate relative to us.
Spooky thought... (Score:2)
Assume that the Many Worlds interpretation is true. In this case, what's to stop our Sun from being a superflare star, flaring on average every seventy five years or so? This would mean that our world and everything we know of the benign nature of the local stellar environment is just an artifact of our survival along an extremely low-probability path of the tree of all possibilities describing the existence of the earth in some approximately life-friendly form.
In effect, we're living in an instance. Realit
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From spooky to downright disturbing, because if that is true, then the passengers of the very first viable colony expedition to another star will look back and see a super flare roast the Earth to a cinder just as soon as they are out of range.
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From spooky to downright disturbing, because if that is true, then the passengers of the very first viable colony expedition to another star will look back and see a super flare roast the Earth to a cinder just as soon as they are out of range.
Too complicated. We'll just get a signle Boltzmann brain [wikipedia.org].
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Not a problem. If many world is true I don't have to worry because there's always a future on one of the branches ahead of me where I will continue to live happily.
Leaves a lot of data out of the story (Score:2)
Sun like stars, what composition are they, their ages, binary systems etc.
I would be curious if they could say what their rotational speeds were compared to our Sun, if these super flare stars have high rotational speeds it could provide enough twisting to create these.
The hot planet theory would mean the mass of the planet had to be high enough and the distance close enough that the gravity center was inside the star to stir it up enough I would think. The idea that some teleconnection or alignment could
this (Score:1)
I wager rotation speed lies behind this. Even if it is possible to see the surface speeds using Doppler spectrum spreading or something, maybe the cores can rotate even faster? A high rotation speed could also be indicative of a different early formation history making the likeliness of close Jupiters small. Another explanation could be that these suns have indeed had close gas giants in the past which now has long crashed into the sun and thereby increased the spin.
I smell a SyFy original movie: Superflare (Score:2)