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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

The blog post with more explanation: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/th...

From that article it says "A good flare can release up to 10% of the Sun’s total energy" but they mean power, not energy, right? Because 10% of the sun's total energy released in that time frame would wipe us out, right?

Power isn't correct either, because power for how long.

I can't figure out what they mean.

I'd guess by '10% of total energy' they mean '10% of the total energy output in that period of time is released just in the area of the _flare_'

Correct. Flares can have an energy around the order of 10% of the total average energy output for the sun per second.

[Edit]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare

> A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun surface or the solar limb, which is interpreted as a large energy release of up to 6 × 10^25 joules of energy[1] (about a sixth of the total energy output of the Sun each second).

Power is outside of the realm of time. P = E/t, so that's why I assumed power. For example, say the sun produces 384 yottawatts, that would be 384 yottajoules per second. Say the flare goes on for 6000 seconds and uses an average of 38 yottawatts, or 228,000 yottajoules over that time period (fun fact, yotta is where SI stops. Strange.)

There's been a movement for a while to add hella as the next SI prefix, for 10^27. It's already been adopted by Google and Wolfram Alpha, among others.

They yotta fix that!

The article doesn't say this flare is releasing 10 percent of the Sun's total energy. Instead it says:

"A good flare can release up to 10% of the Sun’s total energy, the equivalent of billions of nuclear bombs exploding. What’s funny to me is that this wasn’t all that big a flare; it was rated as a class M2.5, far lower in energy than the vast explosions from the Sun back in February."

It still doesn't make sense. The only way to interpret such a sentence is that the flare is releasing 10% of the Sun's rest-mass energy which of course is ludicrous.

I didn't say it made sense, merely clearing up the quote.

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