The Sun Is Lazy

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Our star is not the most active. Comparison of the Sun to other 369 stars of a similar spectral type, age, and metallicity shows that it is truly lazy. The question is – for how long.

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Image by ipicgr from Pixabay

We love the Sun. And now we get to have another reason to love it. While the Sun is changing constantly, new research performed by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany shows that our star is much calmer in comparison to other similar stars. The scientists compared the Sun to hundreds of similar stars to figure this out.

Similarity Is Important

Sami Solanki and his colleagues took stars that are similar to the Sun in key properties. They required the spectral type of star, its surface temperature, age, and metallicity (how much of heavier elements than helium in has in it) to be similar to Sun. But they also wanted to rotation speed to be similar because that is closely tied to the magnetic field of the star in question which then affects how much the star is active.

Data about the rotational speed have only become available recently and only thanks to the observations made by the Kepler space telescope that measured over 150 thousand stars while searching for exo-planets in 2009 – 2013. The Sun turns once every 24.5 days so Solanki and his coworkers took stars with a rotational period of 20 – 30 days. Thus, 369 stars remained to be compared with our Sun.

The results are quite conclusive. The Sun is really lazy. Well, at least it is lazy now. The differences in activity between the active and non-active phases of the Sun are on average just 0.07 %. That is very much below average. The scientists were quite surprised that the Sun is so calm and that the majority of similar stars are much more active.

After this, the scientists studied 2,500 more stars similar to the Sun but ones for which the rotational period is unknown. Their activity changed less than it did for the 369 stars. That is quite strange and there are two possible explanations. Either the choosing of the 369 stars with a rotational period of 20 – 30 days for the study also included some unknown factor or the Sun is currently going through a period of calmness that lasts several thousands of years. If we got to study the activity of the Sun over a longer period of that it is quite possible that its activity would vary much more.

If the second option is true then this would mean that in the future the Sun will get much wilder and will get more likely to fire off solar eruptions more often. Hopefully, this will not be the case anytime soon as this would certainly cause problems for humanity. Thankfully, there are no signs that this should be the case.

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