From there, the prospect only gets more grim. The first hit from a flare of that magnitude would seemingly plant just a glancing blow, but chemical reactions would eventually weaken the planet's ozone layer. While we don't know much about the planet Proxima Centauri b, if you put Earth in its place, it would spell big, big trouble. The only confirmed planet in that system is slightly larger than Earth and in the habitable zone of its star-the region where planets under the right conditions can have stable liquid water. One potential problem with flares of this size is that Proxima Centauri has at least one planet and possibly more. "We estimate that flares of this size occur approximately five times a year on Proxima Centauri," Youngblood says. In fact, the superflare was so bright that an Evryscope algorithm normally used to find such events missed it on the first pass. The flare was 10 times more powerful than any ever witnessed from Proxima Centauri, which is already known for its quite volatile nature. When the flare originally took place two years ago it was detected by the Evryscope, a nightly sky survey telescope that connects 24 consumer-grade camera lenses to look for transient events and transiting planets. (A low magnitude number indicates a high brightness, and some solar system objects are bright enough to dip into negative numbers on the scale.) The flare event placed the star at magnitude 6.8, which would have been as bright as a dim star on a clear, very dark night.
As such, it sits at magnitude 11-whereas the human eye can see magnitudes up to 6 or 7. Proxima Centauri is just 4.2 light years away, but it's a member of the smallest class of normal stars called red dwarfs, which only emit faint visible light. According to the team's findings, the star brightened by a factor of 68 during the "superflare," unleashing 316,227,766,000 petajoules (316,227 petawatts) of energy. Youngblood and colleagues recently released a paper detailing the March 2016 event on, a repository for scientific papers frequently used before studies are published in a journal. The small red dwarf is generally invisible to the human eye, but this flare may have lit it up bright enough for some naked eye observers to see the event-at least under the right conditions, according to Allison Youngblood, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun, recently burst forth with one of the most powerful flares ever seen for a star its size.
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