Hi Wendy,

It depends on what you mean by "super-flare." Human beings and other living things have been living on Earth, going around the Sun, for a long time, and there is no evidence that we have undergone any major harm because of solar activity. So we don't expect anything that could, say, threaten life on Earth. We are well protected by Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field.

However, there is evidence that there have been some pretty serious flares+coronal mass ejections in the past, chiefly the Carrington flare that occurred in 1859.

People have estimated that if that event occurred today it could cause very significant problems because of how reliant we are on technology which can be affected by solar activity. A major event like that could cause wide spread power and communication blackouts as well as problems with satellites and navigation systems. This is discusse in the link above. That is a reason to try to design those systems to be resistant to space weather related problems and to keep a close eye on the Sun.

Terry

I agree with Terry that the answer to your question depnds upon what you mean by a "super-flare." If you have read recent NASA press releases about observations from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and popular science articles about results from the Kepler mission in magazines, you may have read about observations that some people have been calling "superflares."

The observations from Fermi are referring to short-lived gamma-ray flares from the famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant. These so-called "superflares" seem to come from a superdense neutron star that spins 30 times a second at the heart of the expanding gas cloud. The superflares observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope do not come from a star like our Sun.

The main goal of NASA's Kepler mission is to locate planets orbiting around other stars, but there have also been articles in Nature and other magazines about "superflares" observed by the Kepler spacecraft. The "superflares" observed by Kepler had energies between 10 and 10,000 times greater than the famous 1859 Carrington event on our own Sun. Although many of the "superflares" observed by Kepler came from stars of the same type as our Sun, there were some very important differences between these stars and our Sun. A very small number of the of the stars of the same type as our Sun studied by the Kepler mission had "superflares." Most of these stars were very young and rotate in less than 10 days, which is much more quickly than our Sun rotates. A few of these superflares came from stars that rotate more slowly like our Sun. However, these stars have "starspots" that are much bigger than the sunspots on our Sun. Scientists think that billions of years ago, early in the development of our Sun, it could have released "superflares" like the ones observed by Kepler. However, it appears to be highly unlikely that our Sun could have "superflares" like these today.

One thing that people should be aware of when reading popular science articles, and even NASA press releases, is that these sources of information sometimes use similar terminology to describe completely different phenomena. The reason why is that the writers are trying to create catchy headlines and explain the observations using descriptive terminology that will not be intimidating to non-scientists, instead of the technical jargon scientists would use. This can be kind of confusing, so it is important to read the whole article to get the context of the observations and not just the headline!

Filmmakers in Hollywood and science fiction writers tend to latch on to ideas like "superflares erupting on Sun-like stars" from popular science articles, and use them to build scary, end-of-the-world stories for novels and films. Some examples of films using the idea of "superflares" are the disaster film "Knowing" and the story "Inconstant Moon" by Larry Niven. While films and stories like these might be inspired by science, it is important to remember that they are works of fiction and that they may contain out-of-date or just plain inaccurate science.

Kris