Until NASA’s Swift Gamma-ray Burst Space Observatory detected a sequence of seven stellar flares over 10,000 times more powerful than the biggest ever recorded erupting from a red dwarf star in the binary system DG CVn
Space news ( Oct. 30, 2014) – astrophysics: gamma-ray bursts; seven of the most intense, powerful gamma-ray bursts ever detected –
NASA space scientists operating NASA’s Swift Gamma-ray Burst Space Observatory detected a sequence of seven of the most intense, powerful, and long-lasting stellar flares ever seen at 5:07 p.m EDT on April 23, 2014. You can watch a video of the event here. They believe the gamma-rays detected are from stellar flares erupting from the surface of one of a pair of red dwarf stars 60 light-years away in the binary star system DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn). They are currently scratching their heads and rethinking theories on the intensity, power, and length of time of major stellar flaring episodes exhibited by red dwarf stars.
“For about three minutes after the BAT trigger, the superflare’s X-ray brightness was greater than the combined luminosity of both stars at all wavelengths under normal conditions,” noted Goddard’s Adam Kowalski, who is leading a detailed study on the event. “Flares this large from red dwarfs are exceedingly rare.”
“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,” said Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who gave a presentation on the “superflare” at the August meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division. “This was a very complex event.”
At peak power and intensity, space scientist Rachael Osten of the Space Telescope Institute and Stephen Drake of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center indicate this sequence of stellar flares reached 360 million degrees Fahrenheit (200 million Celsius), which is over 12 times hotter than the center of our own sun. Currently, they’re trying to figure out which of the pair of red dwarf stars is the source of the sequence of seven stellar flares they observed.
Space scientists indicate the problem is the pair of red dwarf suns in this binary star system are only about three times the distance apart as the average distance of Earth from the sun. This is too close for instruments to determine which red dwarf star is the culprit in this case.
“This system is poorly studied because it wasn’t on our watch list of stars capable of producing large flares,” said Rachel Osten, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and a deputy project scientist for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, now under construction. “We had no idea DG CVn had this in it.”
NASA space scientists will now turn their attention to stars within 100 light-years of DG DVn. The majority of these suns are middle-aged, like our own sun, but there are over a thousand young red dwarf stars drifting through this region of space. Studying red dwarf suns of the same age as DG CVn (around 30 million years) will allow the best opportunity to observe similar stellar flares as the seven seen recently. They also plan to keep an eye on DG CVn using the Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer in case it unleashes similar stellar flares in the future.
For more information on the Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer visit.
You can find more information on NASA and red dwarf stars here.
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