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Can Earth be affected by flares from other stars?

If Alpha Centauri, which is 4 light years away, had a massive flare, could it reach Earth after a few years and affect us?

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  • 9 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Alpha Centauri is more than a quarter million times (275000 times) farther than the Sun. Any radiation if ever reaches Earth, has its strength diminished in inverse square law fashion, to a trillionth of what we receive from the Sun. The strength would be so weak, that the radiation from Earth's Uranium ores buried in Earth would be far stronger.

    That being the case,can you calculate what would be the radiation (weak by how many trillionths) from 'flare' from a star at about 100 parsecs?

    Our greatest shield from the other stars, is the mind boggling distance from each.

  • 9 years ago

    No... too far....

    Sun is 8 light-minutes away... Alpha Centauri is 2.1E6 light-minutes away... The flare would have to be 1 million times the size of a "our" solar flare... Although stars and their flares vary in size, they don't vary by a factor of a million (I'm not even taking into account that a flare diffuses in 3 dimensional space in cubic fashion = read rapidly, and not linearly)...

    Long story short... We have nothing to worry about... Flares are not like lasers, by the time they'll get to us from that far away, they'll be diffused into nothingness...We're safe.

  • 9 years ago

    If you mean a solar flare, then no (or the effect will at least be nil).

    There are other types of things that can happen to a star in it's life cycle though that could pretty much fry the Earth instantly. Take, for instance, the "jets" from this:

    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/09/nothing-can...

  • 9 years ago

    No. Solar flares even the biggest form the biggest stars don't travel that far.

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  • 9 years ago

    No.

    (don't believe the morons of the gutter press who will write any old total nonsense in an attempt to sell their comics to the gullible & naive)

  • Dennis
    Lv 4
    9 years ago

    Yes!

    Perhaps Flare is a no-no.

    Bang-bang is a definite Yes-yes.

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