The nightmarish ending of the sci-fi disaster film Knowing of 2009 leaves no chance for the inhabitants of the Earth: a monstrous flash on the Sun literally burns out all life.
The scary movie, released five years ago, was recently shown on television again. It so happened - most likely by accident that the demonstration coincided with a discovery made by NASA specialists. And it turned out to be associated with outbreaks, which, as it turned out, are really capable of destroying life on the planets located near the star. If it is there, of course.
The Swift Mission spacecraft recorded a coronal ejection that occurred on a star located 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. As in The Sign.
- One of the largest X-ray flares observed on the Sun occurred in November 2003, was designated X45 according to its power, - says Stephen Drake, astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland … - The one that happened in the DG CVn system should have been assigned the index X100000.
According to the scientist, the discovery was another disturbing confirmation that so-called mega-flares are happening. And our Sun is not an exception here, not a guarantor of serene stability.
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We have complete darkness. Least
By the way, experts from NASA and the American Academy of Sciences, starting in 2012, have been expecting a solar flare of enormous power, which will induce a direct current of such strength into the Earth's electromagnetic field that it will literally burn electrical networks. First of all - transformer substations. And the planet will plunge into darkness.
Scientists predict and regularly report this that the so-called Carrington event, which happened in the fall of 1859, will repeat. Then the young English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed unusually large spots on the luminary, which flashed with a dazzling flash. After 17 hours, the night over many areas of the planet turned into day - it became so light from the green and crimson flashes of the northern lights. The telegraph went out. Sparks poured from the apparatus, stinging telegraph operators and setting fire to paper.
“155 years ago, humanity was just lucky that it did not reach a high technological level,” says James L. Green, one of NASA's directors and magnetosphere specialist. - Now, after such an outbreak, it will take at least 10 years to restore the destroyed world infrastructure. And trillions of dollars.
As it turned out recently, the Sun has experienced much more powerful flares.
A group led by Professor Fusa Miyake studied sections of ancient cedars that grew in Europe. And she discovered that in the Middle Ages, they - cedars - were subjected to a powerful energy impact. 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 was in 775.
The Japanese research intrigued scientists from the Finnish University of Oulu. A group led by Professor Ilya Usoskin confirmed the existence of the phenomenon, found traces of it not only in ancient European cedars, but also in oaks. And in addition, I discovered in the English annals mentions of "glowing serpents in the sky."
According to Ilya Germanovich, people saw flashes of anomalous northern lights. And they could have been generated by a powerful X-ray super-flash on the Sun. Calculations showed that it was 20 times more powerful than the Carrington event. And 100 times more powerful than the most powerful flash recorded in the XX-XXI centuries.
But it turns out that this is far from the limit. That is, the script of the film "The Sign" is quite real.
By the way, the mega-flash in the DG CVn system is also not entirely out of the ordinary event. Hiroyuki Maehara of Kyoto University, Japan analyzed data collected in just 120 days of Kepler space telescope operation. And he found that out of 83 thousand sun-like stars that came into view, 148 produced 365 super-flares. And two of them were "killer" mega-class.
Humanity is not immune from the "doomsday outbreak"