Our Sun is a Weirdly Quiet Star. Lucky? Probably Not.
Today, Space.com published an article about an amazing scientific discovery - our star is not nearly as active as similar stars that scientists have observed. The article is entitled, Our sun is a weirdly 'quiet' star — and that's lucky for all of us , and represents the results of a study of the brightness of stars as viewed by the Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia Star-Mapping Mission. The article notes: "We were very surprised that most of the sun-like stars are so much more active than the sun," Alexander Shapiro, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany and a co-author on the new research, said in a statement. * * * The astronomers narrowed down a collection of tens of thousands of stars by focusing on those with about the same surface temperature, surface gravity, age and metallicity as our sun. Then, they split these stars into two batches: one containing 369 stars that rotate every 20 to 30 days and one with