Flares from a star may not affect nearby planets to the extent we had thought James Thew/Alamy
We thought flares from a star’s surface could harm life on any nearby planet – but an analysis suggests that even if planets are in close orbit around small stars, they may actually escape being singed.
Ekaterina Ilin at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany has been studying flares using data captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). She found that the data made it possible to determine the location of giant flares on four M-dwarfs, the most common…
