UNC’s Evryscope has detected a superflare that briefly made the tiny star Proxima Centauri (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02001.pdf), the nearest star to our Sun, near100x brighter. Proxima Centauri hosts a likely terrestrial-mass planet in its habitable-zone, but Proxima Centauri’s extreme stellar activity casts doubt on its habitability: the Evryscope-detected flares suggest that any ozone in the planet’s atmosphere has been largely destroyed, leaving the surface unprotected from the flares extreme UV flux. For more information visit: http://evryscope.astro.unc.edu/
