Posted on 05/18/2012 11:24:14 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Superflares (white area) arise from starspots (dark areas) much larger than those seen on our Sun.
Hiroyuki Maehara (Kwasan and Hida Observatories, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)
Some middle-aged stars burn and rave like newborns, producing flares thousands of times as energetic as those we see on the Sun, according to the first large survey of these events.
Solar flares occur when magnetic-field loops threading through sunspots get twisted and break, releasing massive amounts of radiation and accelerating charged particles into space. The largest ever measured on the Sun took place on 1 September 1859, and was observed as a mysterious brightening by British astronomer Richard Carrington, who was drawing a group of sunspots at the time.
Hours later, as particles from the event hit Earth and rattled its magnetic shield, auroras graced the skies down to tropical latitudes and telegraphy lines threw off sparks even when disconnected from their batteries. If that happened today, says Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, the current induced in power grids "would fry our transformers".
But flares even more powerful — up to 10 million times as energetic as the so-called Carrington event — have occasionally been observed on other stars. Unfortunately, observations so far have been spotty, with some coming from X-ray satellites and others from visual observations, says Schaefer.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
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2012-05-17 10:20 AM
Has anyone considered that the superflares might in some cases be gravitationally lensed normal flares?
We know that there are trillions of unbound planetary-mass "nomad" objects roaming throughout our Galaxy. Discrete Scale Relativity also predicts trillions of unbound stellar-mass black holes as the galactic dark matter objects.
This represents a very large population of "free-floating" gravitational lenses that will amplify the EM radiation of any source that is lined up with the observer and the lens.
It is possible that many phenomena that are considered intrinsic to the sources are actually due to gravitational lensing by the "nomads" and stellar-mass dark matter objects.
Mike Hawkins has shown that primordial black holes constitute an excellent candidate for explaining quasar variability and the microlensing results of the MACHO, MOA and other groups.
Robert L. Oldershaw
http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
Discrete Scale Relativity
Fractal Cosmology
For your consideration, Sunky!
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