Superflare Blasts Proxima b, the Nearest Exoplanet to Our Solar System

A team of astronomers detected a massive stellar flare from the closest star to our own Sun, Proxima Centauri, which occurred last March.

This finding, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, raises questions about the habitability of our Solar System's nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b, which orbits Proxima Centauri. Astronomers discovered the enormous flare when they reanalyzed observations taken last year by Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, a radio telescope made up of 66 antennae. At peak luminosity it was 10 times brighter than our Sun's largest flares when observed at similar wavelengths. Stellar flares have not been well studied at the wavelengths detected by ALMA, especially around stars of Proxima Centauri's type, called M dwarfs, which are the most common in our galaxy. The flare increased Proxima Centauri's brightness by 1,000 times over 10 seconds.

This was preceded by a smaller flare; taken together, the whole event lasted fewer than two minutes of the 10 hours that ALMA observed the star between January and March of last year. Stellar flares happen when a shift in the star's magnetic field accelerates electrons to speeds approaching that of light. The accelerated electrons interact with the highly charged plasma that makes up most of the star, causing an eruption that produces emission across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Read more here:
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-proxima...
https://carnegiescience.edu/news/prox...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08257
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima...

Clips, images credit: Meredith MacGregor, NASA/JPL, ESA/HUBBLE & ESO 

Music credit: YouTube Audio Library