EUROPE: A solar superflare, which is thousands of times more powerful and devastating than normal flares from the Sun, could destroy our electricity supply, GPS and communications systems, say scientists from the University of Warwick who have been analyzing a stellar superflare. Our hi-tech dependent civilization would grind to a halt.
A stellar superflare is a massive magnetic eruption in the atmosphere of a star. A mega explosion that sometimes occurs on solar-like stars with the energy-equivalent of several thousand normal flares from the Sun. Stellar means from a star, while solar means from our Sun. So, a solar superflare would be one produced by the Sun.
PhD student, Chloë Pugh, who led the study, plus colleagues at the university’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, wrote about a stellar superflare they studied in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. NASA’s Kepler space telescope had detected a stellar superflare with wave patterns very similar to those found in solar flares, the authors explained.
The superflare was detected in a binary star in the Milky Way (our galaxy) called KIC9655129, which is known to sometimes superflare. Ms. Pugh wrote that as its superflares are similar to the Sun’s flares, they both likely share the same underlying physics of flares.
