Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2024

15 JULY-AUGUST 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING this mission was the recording of spikes in stellar activity, including large flares. It was thus demon- strated that, in the period considered, 15 stars re- leased 26 flares that were up to 100 times more pow- erful than the Carrington Event. This frequency was confirmed by observations from the first year of activ- ity of the Transiting Exo- planet Survey Satellite (TESS), Kepler’s successor. Based on this data, the team of researchers be- lieves that a Sun-like star could produce a flare about 10 times more ener- getic than the Carrington Event every 3,000 years and a flare about 100 times more energetic ev- ery 6,000 years. If we choose to ignore the pos- sibility of a potentially civ- ilization-collapsing event such as these, we just have to trust in luck. ! T he view at 10:45 p.m. from outside of Rochester, NY. The aurora shone through street lights, the light-flooded parking lots of major nearby retailers, and a host of other dark sky-unfriendly sources. [Damian Allis] T he so-called “Northern Lights” illuminate the sky over San Francisco’s North Bay as seen from China Camp Beach, in San Rafael, on May 11, 2024. [Tayfun Coskun/Getty Images] (the spectral class that includes the Sun) for four years, searching for planetary transits. A byproduct of activity less dependent on our single obser- vation point and to un- derstand how often a Sun-like star might re- lease a quantity of plasma potentially dev- astating to our tech- nologies, a Japanese team led by Soshi Okamoto (Kyoto Uni- versity, Department of Astronomy) combed through the Kepler space telescope database in 2021. This instrument observed over 90,000 G-type stars