Starship Asterisk*

New Atlas wrote:

To get a sense of how “normal” the Sun may be, astronomers have compared the Sun to hundreds of similar stars. It turns out that it’s actually far less active than its peers – but is this a permanent personality, or is it just going through a phase?
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Using data from the Kepler and Gaia Space Telescopes, the team filtered the most Sun-like stars out of a catalogue of 150,000 main sequence stars. The main criterium was rotation period – the Sun rotates once every 24.5 days, so the researchers focused on stars with 20- to 30-day rotations. Then they narrowed down the list further by looking for stars with surface temperatures, ages and element ratios that most closely matched the Sun. In the end, they came up with 369 Sun-like stars to study.

To the surprise of the team, the Sun seems to be generally much quieter than most other stars. The Sun’s radiation fluctuates by just 0.07 percent between its active and inactive phases, while variations for other stars were usually five times stronger.

bls0326 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 28, 2024 4:55 pm Hi Ann. Congratulations on your palindrome milestone. I have read many, many of your posts. They are quite informative and interesting!

Brian