Alarming Study Finds New Evidence That the Sun Can Produce Catastrophic ‘Superflares’
The star that gives Earth life is also incredibly violent. The Sun frequently erupts with solar storms that can make technology go haywire when directed at our planet. But compared to other stars of its size, temperature, and variability, ours is strangely quiet.
- ▪The star that gives Earth life is also incredibly violent.
- ▪The Sun frequently erupts with solar storms that can make technology go haywire when directed at our planet.
- ▪But compared to other stars of its size, temperature, and variability, ours is strangely quiet.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/alarming-study-finds-new-evidence-that-the-sun-can-produce-catastrophic-superflares-2000814926 |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:45:21 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T20:48:49.226Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T20:48:49.226Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | RX72iF-Etjoi · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The star that gives Earth life is also incredibly violent. The Sun frequently erupts with solar storms that can make technology go haywire when directed at our planet. But compared to other stars of its size, temperature, and variability, ours is strangely quiet. Research has shown that stars like our Sun produce “superflares,” extreme solar flares more powerful than trillions of hydrogen bombs, about once per century. Based on this and other lines of evidence, it stands to reason that the Sun should too, and yet scientists have never observed one. They have found traces of intense onslaughts of high-energy solar particles that have occurred throughout Earth’s history, such as spikes in concentrations of radioactive isotopes inside tree trunks, ice cores, and even meteorites.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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