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From: SciTech Daily
Violent Stellar Flare From Sun’s Nearest Neighbor Breaks Record
By Carnegie Institution for Science
on Apr 21, 2021
Discovery a ‘coup’ in astrophysics involving observations with nine instruments.
A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun’s nearest neighbor — the star Proxima Centauri.
Their work, which could help guide the search for life beyond our Solar System, is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Proxima Centauri is a “red dwarf” with about one-eighth the mass of our Sun, which sits just four light-years, or almost 25 trillion miles, from the center of our Solar System and hosts at least two planets, one of which may look something like Earth.
In a worldwide campaign carried out over several months, the researchers observed Proxima Centauri using nine ground- and space-based telescopes. They caught the extreme flare on May 1, 2019, with five telescopes that traced its timing and energy in unprecedented detail.
“The star went from normal to 14,000 times brighter when seen in ultraviolet wavelengths over the span of a few seconds,” said MacGregor. ...
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