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Massive superflares have been seen erupting from stars like the sun
It isn't only young stars that spit high-energy superflares. Older stars, such as the sun, can also send out bursts of energy that could be powerful enough to strip away planetary atmospheres in close orbit, researchers report.
Such superflares can be seen from hundreds of light-years away. Astrophysicists had assumed that only young stars had these outbursts. But a team of researchers has documented superflares erupting from middle-aged stars, each with a similar temperature and radius to the sun. These massive flares can be at least 100 to 1,000 times as powerful as the average solar flares that Earth normally experiences.
But flares from these older stars are rare. "We have found superflares erupting once every 2,000 to 3,000 years in sunlike stars," says study coauthor Yuta Notsu of the University of Colorado Boulder, who presented the findings June 10 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. By contrast, superflares from younger stars erupt much more frequently, about once every few days.
Also at ScienceAlert.
Do Kepler Superflare Stars Really Include Slowly Rotating Sun-like Stars?—Results Using APO 3.5 m Telescope Spectroscopic Observations and Gaia-DR2 Data (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab14e6) (DX)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:07PM (2 children)
I'm pretty sure the way to terraform Venus is to put mirrors or other structures in its orbit that will block incoming sunlight. That will lower the surface temperature and cause many changes.
Of course, if we do that, we could lose the "floating in the acidic but temperate upper atmosphere" habitat.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:27PM
Since we don't have enough spare energy to push Venus farther away from the sun and closer to us, calming its atmosphere in the process, the easiest way to live there is going to be to terraform its underground.
Find a cave, use materials that can resist, to close the cave and harvest the immense wind energy, then use that energy to dig, and create fuel for when we need to escape the 91%-of-Earth gravity well again.
It sounds silly because we know Venus less than Mars, but the easy availability of massive amounts of energy makes everything easier, once you solve the impossible "going through the atmosphere in the first place" details.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:00AM
One of the main challenges with Venus's atmosphere is that there's so much of it, which leads to the insane atmospheric pressure at the surface and other problems you would have to deal with. Lowering the temperatures by blocking sunlight from orbit would still be part of any terraforming effort, but if you could somehow get rid of about 99% of Venus's atmosphere that would help a lot too.