NASA's Swift satellite detects the X100,000 "superflare" - Video

NASA's Swift satellite detected the "superflare" blasted by a red dwarf star in a binary system called DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn). 

In comparison, the largest flare ever recorded from our Sun was an X45, 10,000 times less powerful.

"We used to think major flaring episodes from red dwarfs lasted no more than a day, but Swift detected at least seven powerful eruptions over a period of about two weeks," said Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who gave a presentation on the "superflare" at the August meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division. "This was a very complex event."

At its peak, the flare reached temperatures of 360 million degrees Fahrenheit (200 million Celsius), more than 12 times hotter than the center of the sun.