The sun is capable of firing off an incredibly powerful superflare that could wreak havoc on Earth's technology-dependent society, a new study suggests. The same basic processes drive the "normal" flares of high-energy radiation emitted by the sun and superflares blasted out by faraway stars, which can be thousands of times more powerful, researchers found. This result "supports the hypothesis that the sun is able to produce a potentially devastating superflare," study co-author Anne-Marie Broomhall, from the University of Warwick in England, said in a statement. The research team analyzed a superflare emitted by the binary star KIC9655129, which lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth, using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Kepler is sensitive enough to pick up tiny brightness fluctuations coming from stars. Indeed, that's how the telescope finds planets. (Subtle brightness dips can be caused by orbiting worlds crossing their stars' faces, as seen from Kepler's