University of Warwick | 2015 Nov 18
[img3="The planet Kepler-438b is shown here in front of its violent parent star. It isThe most Earth-like planet could have been made uninhabitable by vast quantities of radiation, new research led by the University of Warwick has found.
regularly irradiated by huge flares of radiation, which could render the planet
uninhabitable. Here the planet’s atmosphere is shown being stripped away.
(Credit: Mark A Garlick / University of Warwick)"]http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/comm ... r_438b.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438.
Regularly occurring every few hundred days, the superflares are approximately ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.
While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b’s atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render it uninhabitable.
The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun. ...
The Host Stars of Kepler's Habitable Exoplanets: Superflares, Rotation and Activity - D. J. Armstrong et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1511.05306 > 17 Nov 2015