In the constellation of Orion, a cataclysm of monstrous power occurred.
Large-group astrophysicists led by Steve Mairs of the East Asian Observatory: Hilo, Hawaii determined the power of the 2016 burst of JW 566, located in the constellation Orion, 1,500 light years from the sun. Identified and horrified: it was 10 billion times more powerful than typical solar flares. If such a thing happened on our luminary, the inevitable end would come to the Earth. The expelled substance would instantly burn everything around.
Scientists told about their discovery in The Astrophysical Journal, once again sowing doubts: what if the Sun is capable of such meanness.
The sun has shown its power several times.
Very scary
Fears have arisen before. Two years ago, they escalated: the media were full of gloomy forecasts, they say, the end is near. After all, then - in September - the Sun was very violent. For several days in a row, it "spat" into the Earth with flares of class X - the most powerful one according to the existing classification: from X1.3 to X9.3. They disrupted radio communications around the world, accompanied by coronal ejections, magnetic storms that led to power surges, breakdowns in power grids. Some citizens were "knocked out" by fuses. And meteorological people had headaches, their hearts beat faster, their blood pressure went off scale.
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Even worse
Much more powerful was the historical outbreak that occurred in the fall of 1859 and was called the Carrington event - after the English astronomer Richard Carrington, who first noticed the sunspots that generated it. According to rough estimates, the Carrington flare could claim X100. The telegraph was cut off from it, sparks rained down from the apparatus, stinging telegraph operators and setting fire to paper.
Experts from NASA and the American Academy of Sciences, since 2012, have regularly predicted an outbreak of the Carrington scale. And even more powerful. They are waiting for her. According to their estimates, such a flash will induce a constant current of such strength in the Earth's electromagnetic field that it literally burns electrical networks. First of all - transformer substations. And the planet will plunge into darkness.
Very scary
Or maybe something really catastrophic is happening? Easy. A group of Japanese scientists from Nagoya University, led by Professor Fusa Miyake, studied sections of ancient cedars and oaks that grew in Europe. And I discovered that in the Middle Ages, trees were exposed to powerful energetic effects. As a result, the content of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in wood has increased 20 times.
From the annual rings, the Japanese determined that the burst of radiation occurred in 775. Its source was an X-ray super-flare on the Sun. Its power was 20 times higher than that which burned telegraphs. That is, the medieval outbreak could be classified roughly as X2000.
Very, very scary
But this, it turns out, is not the limit. The Swift Mission spacecraft recently recorded a flare and coronal ejection that occurred on a star 60 light-years from Earth in the DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn) system. The expelled material was heated to 200 million degrees Celsius. And the flare itself was 10 thousand times (!) - more powerful than the strongest flare ever observed on the Sun. And it was not some giant that blazed like that, but a red dwarf - a star whose size is much smaller than that of the sun. If aliens lived with this star, then they had the end of the world.
- The flash that happened in the DG CVn system could be assigned the index X100000, says Stephen Drake, astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In the film, the Sign our luminary left earthlings no chance of salvation.
According to the scientist, the discovery testifies: from time to time in our galaxy there are so-called super-mega-flares carrying the apocalypse.
A 10 billion solar flare on a star roughly the class of the Sun is further evidence that scientists' fears are justified. The sun and we together with it from such cataclysms are also not immune.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY