Young Sunlike Star Eruption makes Record Breaking Impact

According to a new study, astronomers may have discovered for the first time a sunlike Star erupting with a massive outburst 10 times larger than anything similar ever witnessed from our sun. According to the researchers, the new findings may offer insight on the effects such huge outbursts may have had on early Earth when life first emerged, as well as the effects such big outbursts may have on present Earth and human societies. Flares from our sun are common, and each one has the energy of millions of hydrogen bombs bursting at the same moment.

Solar flares are frequently accompanied by filaments, which are gigantic brilliant tendrils of solar plasma that can unleash magnetic bubbles of superheated plasma known as coronal mass ejections that hurtle into space at millions of miles per hour. When coronal mass ejections collide with Earth, they can fry satellites in orbit and cause massive geomagnetic storms, which can disrupt electricity systems.

A coronal mass ejection, for example, blacked out the entire Canadian province of Quebec in seconds in 1989, destroying transformers as far away as New Jersey and almost shutting down US power infrastructures from the mid-Atlantic to the Pacific Northwest. Coronal mass ejections have the potential to have a significant influence on the Earth and human culture.

Previous studies discovered that faraway yellow dwarf Star might explode with “superflares,” eruptions with ten times the energy of the most powerful solar flares. Superflares might theoretically produce considerably more powerful coronal mass ejections than our sun, but scientists had not seen any evidence that this was the case until recently.