Our sun is relatively inactive when it comes to solar weather, to the benefit of Earth, but scientists detailed a star much smaller and cooler that blasts powerful flares with greater frequency.
Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the new study details a red dwarf some 35 light years from Earth in the Boîtes constellation. It is almost small and cool enough to be considered a brown dwarf, according to a news release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
The researchers noted how the star completes a rotation every two hours, whereas our sun does so every month, and how it is much more volatile.
"If we lived around a star like this one, we wouldn't have any satellite communications. In fact, it might be extremely difficult for life to evolve at all in such a stormy environment," study lead author Peter Williams, a CfA researchers, said in the release.
Using previous observations made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in Socorro, N.M., the researchers also found the small red dwarf to have a stronger magnetic field than our sun's. For their study, they used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile and determined the star produced emissions 10,000 times brighter as well.
"It's like living in Tornado Alley in the U.S. Your location puts you at greater risk of severe storms," Williams said. "A planet in the habitable zone of a star like this would be buffeted by storms much stronger than those generated by the Sun."
