Credit: Artwork credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) Science Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Kowalski (University of Washington), R. Osten and K. Sahu (STScI), and S. Hawley (Univ. of Washington)
FLARING RED DWARF STAR
This is an artist's concept of a red dwarf star undergoing a
powerful eruption, called a stellar flare. A hypothetical planet is in the foreground.
Flares are sudden eruptions of heated plasma that occur when powerful magnetic fields in a star's atmosphere "reconnect,"
snapping like a rubber band and releasing vast amounts of energy
equivalent to the power of 100 million atomic bombs exploding
simultaneously.
Studying the light from 215,000 dwarfs collected in
observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers
found 100 stellar flares popping off over the course of a week.