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The early Earth under a superflare and super-CME attack: prospects for life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2016

Vladimir Airapetian ,
Alex Glocer  and
Guillaume Gronoff
Vladimir Airapetian
Affiliation:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 20771 email: [email protected]
Alex Glocer
Affiliation:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 20771 email: [email protected]
Guillaume Gronoff
Affiliation:
SSAI/NASA LaRC, Hampton, VA 23681 email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Kepler observations suggest that G-type stars produce powerful flares suggesting that the early Earth may also have been exposed to frequent and energetic solar explosive events generated by the young Sun. We show that powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) events associated with superflares impacting the Earth magnetosphere with a frequency of 1 event/day. What was the impact of superflares, CMEs and associated solar energetic particle (SEPs) events on the atmospheric erosion of the young Earth and habitability? In this paper we discuss our three-dimensional (3D) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations that show that frequent and energetic CMEs from the early Sun continuously destroyed the sub-solar parts of Earth's magnetosphere at heights < 1.25 RE. This suggests that CME shock accelerated energetic protons are capable of penetrating into the polar cap region and breaking atmospheric molecular nitrogen, the major ingredient of the early Earth atmosphere, into atomic nitrogen. Photo-collisional dissociation of molecular nitrogen and carbon dioxide creates reactive chemistry that efficiently produces nitrous oxide and hydrogen cyanide, the essential molecule in prebiotic life chemistry. This raises an possibility that frequent super-CMEs could serve as a potential catalyst for the origin of life on early Earth.

Keywords

SuperflareCMESEPEarly EarthAtmospheresPrebiotic Chemistry
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 11 , Symposium S320: Solar and Stellar Flares and their Effects on Planets , August 2015 , pp. 409 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

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