Powerful Megaflare from Small Star Stuns Scientists (Video, Image)

A series of megaflares unleashed earlier this year by a nearby red dwarf has astronomers rethinking just what these small, dim stars are capable of.

On April 23, NASA's Swift satellite spotted the enormous star flare coming from DG Canum Venaticorum (DG CVn), a system of two red dwarfs located about 60 light-years from Earth. The eruption put to shame anything ever seen on the sun, whose strong flares are classified into three categories, with C flares being the weakest, M of medium strength and X the most powerful.

"The biggest flare we've ever seen from the sun occurred in November 2003 and is rated as X45," Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "The flare on DG CVn, if viewed from a planet the same distance as Earth is from the sun, would have been roughly 10,000 times greater than this, with a rating of about X100,000." [Biggest Solar Flares of 2014: Sun Storm Photos]

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