Flare spotted by telescope on Mauna Kea sets record

Scientists using a Mauna Kea telescope have discovered a massive stellar flare 10 times brighter and more powerful than ever seen before.

“It’s very exciting,” said Steve Mairs, an astronomer with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. “I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.”

Described in a recent edition of the Astrophysical Journal, the discovery could provide additional insight into the origins of our own solar system.

In an interview, Mairs, the lead author, said the 1,500-year-old stellar flare is estimated to be 10 billion times brighter and more powerful than the solar flares observed around the sun.

It was recorded using the telescope’s state-of-the-art high­-frequency radio technology and newly developed image analysis techniques.

Mairs is a member of the JCMT Transient Survey team, an international collaboration of 80 astronomers who have been monitoring eight star-forming regions in the Milky Way every month since December 2015.

The immense stellar flare was identified using 2016 data originally taken from the observatory’s supercooled, ultrasensitive camera, known as SCUBA-2, which observes at the same wavelengths that dust in star-forming regions emit most of their light.

“It surprised us,” Mairs said of the data. “I almost didn’t believe it. Was it a smudge in the image?”

A survey of the same part of the sky six days earlier showed nothing at all in that location.

Mairs said he double- and triple-­checked the data and ran it by a number of colleagues, who confirmed the find.

The record-breaking blast of radiation energy, he said, is believed to have been caused by a disruption in an intense magnetic field that was funneling material onto a young, growing star as it was building mass from its surroundings.

The event lasted only a matter of hours in one of the star-forming regions nearest to Earth, the Orion Nebula, some 1,500 light-years away.

“It was like looking back in time,” the astronomer said.

While the details of how stars are formed are still somewhat fuzzy, the conventional wisdom often describes gas and dust in a nebula forming one star at a time. The latest finding offers a new wrinkle.

“It’s more complicated,” Mairs said, noting that much more research is needed.

With a primary reflector diameter of nearly 50 feet, the JCMT is the largest astronomical telescope in the world designed specifically to operate in the submillimeter wavelength region of the spectrum.

“A discovery of this magnitude could have only happened in Hawaii,” Mairs said.

The JCMT Transient Survey is the first systematic survey at those wavelengths and is scheduled to continue through January.

The latest finding, according to the study, is the first coronal flare discovered at submillimeter wavelengths.