Stalking Venus

NASA expert Rachel Osten, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. says that this solar flare is “massive enough to deplete the atmospheres of any living planet, sterilizing their surfaces.”

It’s the headline to literally end all headlines.

If it applied to our sun, I’d be typing really fast, because even if NASA found out about it the instant it happened, and even if they telephoned me immediately to let me know that we’re all going to die, I’d still only have about 8 minutes to write this entry before the invisible boiling radioactive storm of solar energy blasted across our world, ripping away the atmosphere in a violent steaming bath of nuclear destruction.

The headline is true… But the star that’s decided to throw its celestial toys out of the cot is called EV Lacertae and it’s 16 light years away from us. In astronomical terms, that’s still pretty damned close – our closest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri is only 4 light years away.

EV Lacertae (or as I like to call her, Lassie) is a common red dwarf star, and with the very low magnitude of 10, it’s not even visible to the naked eye under normal circumstances. Consider that our own star, Sol (Solly to those who know him well, and Velly Solly to those who stare at him for too long) is a 4.8 magnitude star. If you were the same distance from Solly as Lassie is from us, you’d be able to see him without any problem at all. But I digress…

The flare was spotted in the “early morning hours” of 25 April by several instruments, including NASA’s Swift X-Ray Telescope. NASA reports that when Swift tried to observe the star with its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, the flare was so bright that the instrument shut itself down for safety reasons. The star remained bright in X-rays for 8 hours before settling back to normal.

(A quick diversionary rant here: How come, with scientific news of this scale, doesn’t a single top-ranked news source, including NASA itself give the actual UTC time of the initial sighting? Does NASA believe that everyone lives in America and it is early morning at the same time globally? Tut-fucking-tut.)

Anyway. We stagger boldly where no news site has staggered before…

Lassie is a fairly young star – estimated at only a few hundred million years – and she rotates on her ass one hell of a lot faster than good ol’ Solly. Whereas Sol rotates once every four weeks, EV Lacertae does a full rotation in only four days. This gives rise to incredibly strong localised magnetic fields – over 100 times more magnetically potent than Sol’s. It’s the energy stored in these fields that cause such monumental flares. If the position of the star in relation to Earth didn’t mean that it was only detectable for a few hours each night in the Northern hemisphere’s spring, it probably would have been visible to the naked eye for a couple of hours while it was flaring.

While flares release energy across the elecromagnetic spectrum, their intensely high gas temperatures can only be measured by extremely specialised high-energy telescopes like those on Swift.

Swift has rapid repositioning response and a wide field of view designed to study the gamma ray bursts associated with the birth of black holes that make it ideal for use in more localised studies of flare activity.

“I find it remarkable that a satellite designed to detect the explosive birth of black holes in distant galaxies can also detect explosions on stars in the immediate neighborhood of our Sun,” says Eric Feigelson of Penn State University in University Park, Pa.

Sources & Refs:
Universe Today, NASA, GSU Hyperphysics