Space Weather & Heliophysics

Sun-like Stars Produce Superflares Roughly Once Per Century

By Keith Cowing

Press Release

December 22, 2024

Filed under astronomy, exoplanet, flare, habitability, heliophysics, radiation, solar flare, space weather, Spectroscopy, Stellar Cartography, Stellar superflare

Sun-like Stars Produce Superflares Roughly Once Per Century — Spatial localization of the example superflare. (A) Kepler image of the same flare on KIC 8183083 as in Fig. 1 during the maximum flare light. (B) The same flare 30 min later. Greyscale (see color bar) indicates the flux in each pixel during the flare. The blue outlines indicate the four pixels used to extract the light curve (Fig. 1) and the cyan star is the catalog position of the star (25). The orange ellipses indicate the 68%, 95%, and 99.9% confidence levels obtained by fitting a model of a point source to those images. The star is located within the 99.9% confidence contour in both images, so we attribute the flare in the light curve to this target. — astro-ph.SR

Stellar superflares are energetic outbursts of electromagnetic radiation, similar to solar flares but releasing more energy, up to 10³⁶ erg on main sequence stars.

It is unknown whether the Sun can generate superflares, and if so, how often they might occur. We used photometry from the Kepler space observatory to investigate superflares on other stars with Sun-like fundamental parameters.

We identified 2,889 superflares on 2,527 Sun-like stars, out of 56,450 observed. This detection rate indicates that superflares with energies >10³⁴ erg occur roughly once per century on stars with Sun-like temperature and variability.

The resulting stellar superflare frequency-energy distribution is consistent with an extrapolation of the Sun’s flare distribution to higher energies, so we suggest that both are generated by the same physical mechanism.

Valeriy Vasilyev, Timo Reinhold, Alexander I. Shapiro, Ilya Usoskin, Natalie A. Krivova, Hiroyuki Maehara, Yuta Notsu, Allan Sacha Brun, Sami K. Solanki, Laurent Gizon
Comments: Accepted for publication in Science
Subjects: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2412.12265 [astro-ph.SR] (or arXiv:2412.12265v1 [astro-ph.SR] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.12265
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Journal reference: SCIENCE 12 Dec 2024; Vol 386, Issue 6727, pp. 1301-1305
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl5441
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Submission history
From: Valeriy Vasilyev
[v1] Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:00:03 UTC (1,151 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12265

Astrobiology,

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻

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