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 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.