This can cause telecommunications failures on Earth, changes in the orbits of low altitude satellites … But 4,000 million years ago they could give a boost to the appearance of life on Earth.
A study published recently in Nature Geoscience states that the super storms that the Sun suffered when it was young could help create the molecules necessary for life to appear on our planet.
For this, the flares that are currently observed in young stars similar to the Sun have been studied: they present a level of activity much higher than our star, which is now in its “maturity”. The researchers postulate that the very energetic particles emitted in these ‘super storms’ collided with the molecules present in the Earth’s atmosphere, including nitrogen, breaking them apart. The two nitrogen atoms released recombined producing nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, and hydrocyanic acid, a fundamental component in the construction of DNA. According to one of the co-authors, Vladimir Airapetian, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “our Sun has not only been a source of heat, it has also produced the ingredients for life .” According to the calculations of Airapetian and his colleagues, the flares of the young Sun could be up to a thousand times greater than the most intense that we have on record.
We must bear in mind that 4,000 million years ago the Sun was 30% less luminous than it is today. This means that the amount of energy reaching Earth was not enough to keep surface temperatures above the freezing point of water without the help of greenhouse gases , such as nitrous oxide created by solar flares. And the appearance of the first molecule capable of copying itself, the ancestor of our DNA, required other smaller molecules, such as hydrocyanic acid, to build itself.
