The Most Important Science News You've Heard in the Last Five Minutes

I could spend this post talking about how half of all Earth's wildlife has died since 1960, everybody else certainly is.  It's a big number, but honestly?  Not that surprising.  I guess it's good to have a number on just how much of nature we've killed off, but it didn't take a genius to know it was a lot.  No, today, I'm going to talk about something much more important in the world of science: gigantic solar flares.

When I say gigantic, I mean it.  These flares, coming from DG Canum Venaticorum, a red dwarf binary system 60 light years away, are the biggest ever recorded.  It was about 10,000 times more powerful than our sun's meager flares, reaching a temperature of 360 million degrees.  The stars are young, only about 30 million years old, but the key to the flare was the rotational period of the flare star.  It orbits in about a day, while the Sun takes about a month.  Fast rotation means more magnetic  activity, which leads to more powerful solar flares.  That's how a piddling little red dwarf produced the most powe
rful solar flare ever.

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