Hubble image archive
Flaring Red Dwarf Star
This is an artist's concept of a red dwarf star undergoing a powerful eruption, called a stellar flare. A hypothetical planet is in the foreground.Flares are sudden eruptions of heated plasma that occur when the field lines of powerful magnetic fields in a star's atmosphere "reco...
- Date
- Jan 1, 2011
- Mission
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Archive ID
- hubblesite-images-2011-02-2807-image
This is an artist's concept of a red dwarf star undergoing a powerful eruption, called a stellar flare. A hypothetical planet is in the foreground.
Flares are sudden eruptions of heated plasma that occur when the field lines of powerful magnetic fields in a star's atmosphere "reconnect," snapping like a rubber band and releasing vast amounts of energy equivalent to the power of 100 million atomic bombs exploding simultaneously.
Studying the light from 215,000 dwarfs collected in observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers found 100 stellar flares popping off over the course of a week.
Credits
Artwork credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)Science Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Kowalski (University of Washington), R. Osten and K. Sahu (STScI), and S. Hawley (University of Washington)
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Source
Image and source material are credited to the official mission archive linked below.
View on NASA.gov