There’s Something Special About the Sun: It’s a Bit Boring
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/science/sun-magnetic-storms.html
Source: By Adam Mann, The New York Times.
Excerpt: The sun, like all stars, is a blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma. From its surface emerge magnetic field lines that can cause dark patches known as sunspots. Turn up the activity of these magnetic whorls, and you get more solar storms flinging deadly charged particles and radiation throughout our solar system. If enough of these punishing waves hit a rocky planet, that planet might end up microwaved into a dreary condition where nothing could live. ...A study released Thursday in the journal Science suggests that our sun is rather tame compared with its stellar siblings, and that hundreds of other sun-like stars in our galaxy have on average five times more magnetic activity than our parent star. ...Some previous studies also implied that the sun was quieter than other similar stars. But competing evidence has also found the sun’s activity level is normal for stars of its size. ...Timo Reinhold, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and co-author of the paper ...and colleagues looked at data collected by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope, which continuously monitored approximately 150,000 stars in the Milky Way for four years to find exoplanets, and was capable of observing brightness variations from activity such as the appearance and disappearance of starspots. ...During times of peak magnetic activity, when spots pop out all over the surface, a star will dim. Our sun’s cycle lasts about 11 Earth years. For the sun, this dimming is negligible. Data from the past 140 years indicates that its brightness changes by less than a tenth of a percent over the course of its cycle. But for the stars studied by Kepler, the variability could be up to 12 times that amount....
Source: By Adam Mann, The New York Times.
Excerpt: The sun, like all stars, is a blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma. From its surface emerge magnetic field lines that can cause dark patches known as sunspots. Turn up the activity of these magnetic whorls, and you get more solar storms flinging deadly charged particles and radiation throughout our solar system. If enough of these punishing waves hit a rocky planet, that planet might end up microwaved into a dreary condition where nothing could live. ...A study released Thursday in the journal Science suggests that our sun is rather tame compared with its stellar siblings, and that hundreds of other sun-like stars in our galaxy have on average five times more magnetic activity than our parent star. ...Some previous studies also implied that the sun was quieter than other similar stars. But competing evidence has also found the sun’s activity level is normal for stars of its size. ...Timo Reinhold, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and co-author of the paper ...and colleagues looked at data collected by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope, which continuously monitored approximately 150,000 stars in the Milky Way for four years to find exoplanets, and was capable of observing brightness variations from activity such as the appearance and disappearance of starspots. ...During times of peak magnetic activity, when spots pop out all over the surface, a star will dim. Our sun’s cycle lasts about 11 Earth years. For the sun, this dimming is negligible. Data from the past 140 years indicates that its brightness changes by less than a tenth of a percent over the course of its cycle. But for the stars studied by Kepler, the variability could be up to 12 times that amount....