Proxima Centauri occasionally blows his anger in a bright display of radiation, like most red dwarf stars that are very hot as streams of plasma and light spill into his system.
For us, viewing these eruptions from a safe distance gives insight into the mechanics of stellar physics. And in 2019, astronomers trained nine telescopes around the world to observe Proxima Centauri in a 40-hour marathon session.
No detail was planned to be missed - using telescopes such as the Australian Pathfinder Square Array, the Atacama Large Millimeter / Sub-millimeter Array, and the Transient Exoplanet Reconnaissance Satellite, they listened to multiple frequencies, from radio to X-rays.
"It's the first time that we've had this kind of multi-wavelength coverage of stellar flare," says astrophysicist Meredith McGregor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Not only did five of their instruments see the largest glow seen in the Proxima Centauri system so far, but the signature of the volcanic eruption was strange enough to suggest a completely new type of solar event.
And again in 2016, astronomers discovered a similar super glow, which can be seen without telescopes.
And although it is technically larger, it got 14,000 times brighter over a period of a few seconds, this newer activity has largely been in the form of wavelengths that we cannot see, as it does in the ultraviolet and radio parts of the spectrum.
Finding such a strong spike in the radio area of millimeter-range waves was quite unexpected, which made the flare really worth the attention.
"In the past, we didn't know stars could ignite in the millimeter range, so this is the first time we're looking for millimeter flares," says McGregor.
The timing and energies of the different wavelengths of light in a glow provides astrophysicists with a fresh look at the mechanisms behind glow production, while adding details to our models.
Also, knowing that solar flares emitted in this part of the spectrum means that researchers will be more inclined to train a larger set of tools on variable stars in the future, in the hope of picking up a "stray whisper" of the radiation they missed before.
"There are likely to be more strange types of flares that show different kinds of physics that we haven't thought about before," said McGregor.
It won't be the last tantrum we'll see from Proxima Centauri, and it probably won't be the biggest. While this unusual eruption was the largest of the flares seen during the 40-hour window of observations, they weren't the only ones the researchers saw.
In fact, our little neighbor could be in a semi-permanent rage, unleashing radiation at least once a day, and maybe more.
The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters .
Source: ScienceAlert
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