Nearby Star Unleashes Flare 10,000 Times Bigger Than Any From Our Sun
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Our sun's largest solar flare looks pretty wimpy next to this one.
NASA's Swift satellite spotted the strongest, hottest, and longest-lasting stellar flaresever recorded from a nearby red dwarf star in April. And now, astrophysicists reveal that the flares were as much as 10,000 times more powerful than the largest solar flare ever recorded -- reaching temperatures up to 360 million degrees Fahrenheit. That's 12 times hotter than the sun's core.
Just check out the video above.
"We used to think major flaring episodes from red dwarfs lasted no more than a day, but Swift detected at least seven powerful eruptions over a period of about two weeks," Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a written statement. "This was a very complex event."
Stellar!
