A one-page paper Stephen Naftilan and I published in 1973 in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific became a major component of a national science news story in January. I had been examining flare stars in the Pleiades region. These are small, red dwarf stars about 1/10 the mass of the Sun and about half the surface temperature that randomly brighten, sometimes to several times their quiescent brightness. Two stars did not seem to be members of the cluster so I asked Steve to add them to his observing program on a visit to Kitt Peak National Observatory.

This star chart (below) shows MT Tauri’s position relative to the Pleiades, shown in the large circle. (Graphic from MegaStar) Above is the Pleiades photo from the cover, with MT Tauri located just beyond the bottom right corner of the image. (photo by Chuck Vaughn)

Both of them turned out to be behind the Pleiades. The most interesting star, over eight times further away than the Pleiades, had the spectrum of a perfectly normal star only slightly cooler than our sun! This is like discovering that one of your parents is a werewolf. Would the sun, like this star, suddenly double in brightness for a few minutes? How would this affect the Earth’s ecosystem? We thought it was an exciting result but, except for a Mexican astronomer who confirmed the original flare observation, nobody seemed very interested and we were too young and naïve to know how to make it a more widely accessible result.

Recently, Yale astronomers Bradley Schaefer and Eric Rubenstein started to collect unusual flaring events observed on apparently ordinary stars back to 1899. They discovered nine well-documented one-time events. Our star, now designated MT Tauri, was the one closest in type to the sun. After discussions with me, Brad decided to present the findings at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society. His results were soon picked up by the national press, including ABCNEWS.com and the Monterey County Herald.

How awful could such a superflare, that only lasts a few minutes, be? Brad had thought about that: "Kiss our satellite fleet goodbye." In addition, it would trigger chemical reactions in the earth’s atmosphere that would destroy the ozone layer. Without the ozone layer, ultraviolet radiation would ‘sanitize’ the planet, killing bacteria and plankton and, hence, starve all the other animals up the food chain.

Is this a likely event? Is life about to come to an end? Probably not. There is little evidence in our solar system that such an event has happened in the recent past. Schaefer, mindful of the not so distant scare over the asteroid that was going to impact the Earth in 20 years, has suggested that it might take a giant, Jupiter-sized planet close to the star to cause a super-flare discharge.