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NASA's Swift Mission Observes Mega Flares from a Mini Star
On April 23, NASA's Swift satellite detected the strongest, hottest, and longest-lasting sequence of stellar flares ever seen from a nearby red dwarf star. The initial blast from this record-setting series of explosions was as much as 10,000 times more powerful than the largest solar flare ever recorded.
"We used to think major flaring episodes from red dwarfs lasted no more than a day, but Swift detected at least seven powerful eruptions over a period of about two weeks," said Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who gave a presentation on the "superflare" at the August meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division. "This was a very complex event."
The strongest recorded solar flare was an X45 on November 4, 2003. During this flare event it overwhelmed the sensors of the GEOS-15 satellite at X17, but was later upgraded to an X28. It has since been updated to an X45 event.
According to both NOAA and Wikipedia, an X1 Class solar flare produces 0.0001 watts of energy per square meter or greater. Therefore, an X45 solar flare would produce 0.0045 watts of energy per square meter. However, that cannot be correct. That is too absurdly small.
That cannot be correct either. That is too absurdly large.
Outside of Earth's atmosphere the sun normally produces ~1,300 watts of energy per square meter. However, the atmosphere of the planet absorbs some of this energy and by the time the sunlight reaches the surface of the planet it produces ~1,000 watts of energy per square meter.
I cannot figure out this solar flare classification scheme. In order to cause an aurora, much less having the ionized particles reach he surface of the planet, there must be considerably more energy than 1,300 watts per square meter hitting the planet.
If the solar flare classification scheme uses a logarithmic scale, then a solar flare that is 10,000 times more powerful that an X45 solar flare would be producing 17.6 trillion watts of energy per square meter (the equivalent of 17.6 trillion Joules per second).
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