- don't worry though, it's only for a sci-fi backrgound I'm writing 
My original plan, before I heard of these superflares, was to have the sun to suddenly shed its outermost layers, which would melt half of Mercury and the Moon, and blast off most of Venus, Earth and Mars' atmospheres. But these flares sound much more realistic (at least in the sense of being possible
)
So I ask the assembled astronomical minds here, what do you think would happen if the sun was to superflare? What would the sequence of events be? Would the whole star suddenly brighten dramatically, or would it be focussed in a particular direction (if so, assume it points at Earth here). Would an entire hemisphre brighten? Or just part of it? Presumably, since it's got something to do with mangled magnetic field lines, sunspot activity would be going through the roof in the days or weeks beforehand, so that might give us some warning to start evacuating the planet (this is a scifi background, remember
) .
I'm figuring that there'd be two effects, lasting over say, a week or two - the increased luminosity and the actual material blasted out by the flares. When the flare actually starts on the sun, we'd see the brightening from it 8 minutes later, but presumably the material ejected by the flare wouldn't arrive til later - how much later though? What effect would the incoming flare material have on the Earth and other planets? Could it physically blast away atmospheres? And how much would the sun brighten by - the solstation site says it could increase by up to 1000 times?! The increased temperature would surely boil oceans and drive off atmospheres too, wouldn't it? Or would there not be enough time to do that if it only lasts for a week?
Any conjecture or hard fact would be most welcome
.