By Nadia Drake
Not just a sartorial trend in ’70s trousers, superflares are enormous stellar eruptions that dwarf the most energetic sneeze the sun is likely to produce.
For more than a decade, astronomers thought these outbursts resulted from magnetic interactions between a star and a tightly orbiting, and therefore hot, Jupiter-size planet. But data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft suggest that while a magnetic trigger does ignite mega-eruptions on sunlike stars, snuggled-up Jupiters don’t appear to be necessary, a team of scientists from Japan reports online May 16 in Nature.
“The default picture of these has been hot Jupiters,” says Bradley Schaefer, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University. “There’s no alternative [theory] out there.”