Can Superflares Occur on Our Sun

By Kazunari Shibata, H. Isobe, Andrew Hillier, A. Choudhuri, Hiroyuki Maehara, T. Ishii, Takuya Shibayama, S. Notsu, Y. Notsu, T. Nagao and 2 more. 2012

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Recent observations of solar type stars with the Kepler satellite by Maehara et al. have revealed the existence of superflares (with energy of 10^33 - 10^35 erg) on Sun-like stars, which are similar to our Sun in their surface temperature (5600 K - 6000 K) and slow rotation (rotational period > 10 days). From the statistical analysis of these superflares, it was found that superflares with energy 10^34 erg occur once in 800 years and superflares with 10^35 erg occur once in 5000 years on Sun-like stars. In this paper, we examine whether superflares with energy of 10^33 - 10^35 erg could occur on the present Sun through the use of simple order-of-magnitude estimates based on current ideas relating to the mechanisms of the solar dynamo.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2a078f3ffda98012ed5d093f8a1bdee2fca826b

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Citations in the corpus

SUPERFLARES ON SOLAR-TYPE STARS OBSERVED WITH KEPLER. I. STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF SUPERFLARES (2013, background): “On the other hand, Shibata et al. (2013) concluded that we cannot reject the possibility that superflares of 1034–1035 erg would also occur on our present Sun with a frequency of once in a few 1000 yr in view of the present theory of flares and dynamos.”
MAGNETIC PROPERTIES OF SOLAR ACTIVE REGIONS THAT GOVERN LARGE SOLAR FLARES AND ERUPTIONS (2016, background): “…of the magnetic energy that is released in the flare event, compared to another expression (e.g., Maehara et al. 2012; Aulanier et al. 2013; Shibata et al. 2013): ∣ ∣ ∣ ∣ ( ) p p ~ ~ ~ ´ ⎛ ⎝⎜ ⎞ ⎠⎟ ⎛ ⎝⎜ ⎞ ⎠⎟ E B V B S B S 8 8 2.9 10 688 G 954 MSH erg. 12 mag 2 mag AR 2 spot 3 2 33 AR 2 spot…”
Statistical properties of superflares on solar-type stars based on 1-min cadence data (2015, methodology): “The thin dotted line indicates the power-law function with an index of−1.8 taken from Shibata et al. (2013).”
Do Kepler Superflare Stars Really Include Slowly Rotating Sun-like Stars?—Results Using APO 3.5 m Telescope Spectroscopic Observations and Gaia-DR2 Data (2019, background): “The values of solar flares in Figure 6 are the same as those in our previous studies (Notsu et al. 2013b; Shibata et al. 2013; Maehara et al. 2015).”