In August, we learned that the nearest star to our solar system is likely to have a rocky, Earth-sized planet orbiting it – and now the star, too, turns out to be more like the sun than we thought.
Proxima Centauri has been found to experience a seven-year activity cycle, similar to the sun’s 11-year cycle. At times, up to a third of its surface is pockmarked by starspots, which can produce flares. But unlike the sun’s relatively sedate flares, Proxima’s raging flares and outbursts of X-ray and ultraviolet radiation could prove deadly for any hypothetical life on its planet, Proxima b.
The star is a red dwarf, and was known to be just one-tenth the size of the sun and one-thousandth of its brightness. It also has a slightly different internal structure, so hadn’t been thought to experience the regular activity cycle of sun-like stars, says Brad Wargelin at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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