NASA's Kepler Spots Thousands Of Extreme 'White Light' Stellar Flares

New data from NASAs Kepler space telescope is allowing astronomers a glimpse at potentially catastrophic flaring in a solar-type star roughly 300 light years away.

The observations detail some of the largest flaring events ever detected from a fully-mature G spectral-type star, known for now by its Kepler Input Catalog number KIC 11551430. Flaring from the star is several thousands times stronger than the Carrington Event a September 1859 solar super-flare, hundreds of times stronger than most of our Suns X-class flares (the most powerful solar flares yet classified).

We are counting thousands of white light flares from KIC 11551430 in a range from 10 to 10,000 times bigger than the biggest flares produced by our own Sun, Rachel Osten, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and the team leader on the Kepler survey of this star, told Forbes.

When you count and plot these really energetic stellar flares, said Osten, you expect to have more and more energetic flares happening less and less frequently. The fact that we see a limit on the flare energies for these stars, Osten says, sort of confirms that these flares get their energy from star spots, or magnetic fields poking through the stellar surface.

A major solar eruption is shown in progress October 28, 2003. (Photo by Solar & Heliospheric Observatory/NASA via Getty Images)

In the mid-19th century, x-ray measurements of the Carrington Event werent yet available. But because the superflare was associated with spectacular Earth auroras, Osten says the event was likely coupled with a coronal mass ejection (or CME) a magnetized plasma streaming high-energy accelerated particles at thousands of kilometers per second.

Osten says our own Sun might still be capable of producing something slightly larger than the Carrington Event which, at the time, sent the new technology of the telegraph into a tailspin.

But in its 4.5 billion year history, has the Sun ever produced a flare 10,000 times larger than the Carrington Event?

Almost certainly, yes, said Osten. During its first hundred million years, the Sun was very active.

Osten says a close binary stellar companion in which two stars are gravitationally interacting might explain why KIC 11551430, located in the bright constellation of Cygnus, is so active. She says that when two stars are that close, tidal forces cause their rotation and orbital period to be coupled with each other. As a result, a star with a close binary companion will rotate much faster than if it were simply a single star.