As far as stars go, SDSSJ013333 is like the silent kid in school that no one remembers. Small, dim, and unmarked, it does little to get attention. That is until he throws a whopping huge tantrum.
Days before 2018 draws to a close, the ground-based Wide Angle Camera (GWAC) at the Xinglong Observatory in Beijing warned researchers about a light explosion worth noticing.
After peaking in just under a minute, the whole event – a solar flare known as GWAC 181229A – lasted a few hours. But with its source, it was worth considering for the record books.
Swiftly scrolling through star catalogs SDSSJ013333 appeared to sink by itself about 490 light-years away, so dark and distant the astronauts had a hard time pushing down how far away. it really was. Not a star you would expect to explode something so obvious.
SDSSJ013333 belongs to a type of stellar material called ultra-cool dwarfs. Usually about a third of our own solar mass, they have an efficient temperature that is only half as hot, and a slow furnace that lasts hundreds of billions of years.
But while ultra-cool dwarfs can slow things down, every now and then their magnetic fields knot and reconnect in ways that see them explode with horrific explosions of radiation. and plasma.
We’re not talking tiny roasting either. Thanks to the brightness of many such emissions, these flames can only be described as superb.
Superflares are usually juvenile work, especially the slightly warmer red dwarfs. A red dwarf man was captured by a Japanese research team last year, measuring about 20 times as powerful as anything seen coming out of our sun.
But the flare sent by the ultra-cool SDSSJ013333 left one tear that would embarrass him.
Usually measured in a unit of energy called erg (from an ancient Greek word for work, ergon), a typical flame could emit around 10 ^ 30 ergs. Superflares can reach as high as around 10 ^ 36 ergs.
Astronomers estimated that SDSSJ013333 released just over 10 ^ 34 ergs of energy; a cowardly quest for such a cold star, and perhaps among the greatest ever recorded for a man in his special class.
To put it another way, the flare temporarily made the star 10,000 times brighter, bringing its size from just over 24 down to a clearer view of 15. Not something we could see with the naked eye naked, but clear enough to catch a good telescope.
The researchers have made their findings available on the pre-published arXiv database for public review, where we can read their comments while awaiting peer review.
As amazing as the event is, it is only in the context of other flames that we can learn how an ultra-cool dwarf – which makes up about 15 percent of the stellar material in our corner of the galaxy – shaping and developing.
“Thanks to the large view and high survey end, GWAC is well suited for white light detection. In fact, we have found over 130 white lights flares with an amplitude greater than 0.8 mag, “the team reports.
“More GWAC units are expected to be operational in the next two years, aiming to increase the detection rate of high-width stellar flames by monitoring more than 5,000 square steps simultaneously.”
There is a lot of space. But we need to cast a wide net to see what else lies out in our galaxy.
By gaining strong evidence of what these stars are capable of eliciting astronomers can gain a better understanding of the physics of orbiting their surface.
It also affects the viability of life around these stars.
TRAPPIST-1 is one ultra-cool dwarf that was turned around a few years ago. It was found surrounded by a wide family of exoplanets – some of them in a zone that could be wet with melt water – it was once considered a hot spot for future alien hunters.
That was all until astronomers summed up the frequency with which TRAPPIST-1 baked the offspring of a tiny world in a sterilizing tsunami of energetic solar winds.
Similarly, if SDSSJ013333 were once home to an alien paradise, chances are slim that many would stand there now.
This research was published on arXiv.org.