Why is it in news?

• By analysing the piece of Efremovka meteorite, researchers have envisaged how the sun behaved in its infancy and further deduced super flares could have been million times stronger than solar flares.

What is a Meteorite?

• A meteorite is a solid piece of debris from an object, such as a comet, asteroid, or meteoroid, that originates in outer space and survives its passage through the atmosphere to reach the surface of a planet or moon.

Super flare:

• Superflares are very strong explosions observed on stars with energies up to ten thousand times that of typical solar flares.

Solar flare

• A solar flare is a sudden flash of increased brightness on the Sun, usually observed near its surface and in close proximity to a sunspot group.

Pristine meteorite:

• Efremovka is one of the most pristine meteorites in the collections.
• Hence, there is a much greater probability of finding preserved isotopic records from the time of formation of the solar system. The first suggestion of irradiation by the Sun as a source of elements found in
• early solar system solids came from a study of the beryllium-10 radio nuclide in the Allende meteorite.
• This work, on the other hand, studies both beryllium-7 decaying to lithium -7 and beryllium-10 decaying to boron-10. This short half-life of beryllium-7 helps rule out the two competing theories and indicates that it is only irradiation by solar flares that led to the formation of the elements captured by the Calcium aluminium rich inclusions (CAI).