The Sun has the Potential to Emit a Civilization-Destroying Superflare (+Video)

The sun is capable of firing off an incredibly powerful superflare that could wreak havoc on Earth’s technology-dependent society, a new study suggests.

Strong solar flares can cause temporary radio blackouts, and they’re often accompanied by massive explosions of solar plasma called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can be even more disruptive. Powerful CMEs that hit Earth, for example, can trigger geomagnetic storms that affect GPS navigation, radio communications and power grids for extended periods of time.

So the consequences of a superflare (and possible associated super-CME) could be disastrous

The same basic processes drive the “normal” flares of high-energy radiation emitted by the sun and superflares blasted out by faraway stars, which can be thousands of times more powerful, researchers found.

This result “supports the hypothesis that the sun is able to produce a potentially devastating superflare,” study co-author Anne-Marie Broomhall, from the University of Warwick in England, said in a statement.

So the sun has the potential to emit a civilization-destroying superflare. Rest easy, people — Pugh says that it’s ”very unlikely in our lifetimes” the sun emits a superflare. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t safeguard ourselves from the destruction a normal solar flare could bring, but at least we know our sun isn’t more prone to violence than the rest of the stars of the universe.

The Sun could release flares 1000x greater than previously recorded
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-sun-flares-1000x-greater-previously.html

Sun Could Unleash Devastating ‘Superflare’
http://www.space.com/31295-sun-catastrophic-superflare-possible.html

A Nearby Star Is Regularly Spewing Violent Superflares 
https://www.inverse.com/article/8784-a-nearby-star-is-regularly-spewing-violent-superflares

A MULTI-PERIOD OSCILLATION IN A STELLAR SUPERFLARE
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/813/1/L5

Image credit: NASA