Scientists have discovered an extremely small duration flare, recorded as the largest flare till date from sun’s nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri. In this recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters led by CU Boulder, scientists for the first time have gone looking for millimeter flares from stars.
Proxima Centauri is a small but mighty star which is located at just four light-years away from the sun. It is also a red-dwarf, the reason behind being unusually lively, and is just one-eight of the mass of our sun.
The star hosts two planets, one that resides in the ‘habitable zone‘ – a region around a star that has the right range of temperature for harboring liquid water on the surface of a planet. Being the nearest star it has long been a target for scientists hoping to find life beyond Earth’s solar system. Thus this research could help to shape the hunt for life beyond Earth’s solar system.
To see just how much Proxima Centauri flares, the researchers pointed nine different instruments at the star for 40 hours over the course of several months in 2019. Five of them recorded the massive flare from Proxima Centauri, capturing the event as it produced a wide spectrum of radiation.
“The star went from normal to 14,000 times brighter when seen in ultraviolet wavelengths over the span of a few seconds,” said MacGregor, an assistant professor at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy (CASA) and Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) at CU Boulder.
This discovery hint at new physics that could change the way scientists think about stellar flares. In all, the observed flare was roughly 100 times more powerful than any similar flare seen from Earth’s sun.
“In the past, we didn’t know that stars could flare in the millimeter range, so this is the first time we have gone looking for millimeter flares,” MacGregor said.
“Those millimeter signals,” MacGregor added, “could help researchers gather more information about how stars generate flares. Currently, scientists suspect that these bursts of energy occur when magnetic fields near a star’s surface twist and snap with explosive consequences.”
The researchers recorded many other flares during the 40 hours they spent watching the star. These findings suggest that there may be more surprises in store from the sun’s closest companion.
References:
- https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/abf14c
- https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/04/21/proxima-flare
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