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Corey Hopkins
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Like stars, the Sun is the only one of its kind in the solar system held together by its own gravity. It is contained in two planets, Earth and Mars, and two moons, Mercury and Venus, while Jupiter contains most of the rest.
KOI 456 - 04 is less than half the size of Earth and orbits around Kepler-160 at a distance of about 1,500 light years - as far as the researchers can tell. A full orbit is 378 days, and there is only one other star of this size in the Milky Way. The average size of all stars in our galaxy is probably less massive than the Sun, but our Sun is among the top 10% of the mass, with a mass of 1.5 times that of the Sun.
Perhaps most importantly, it receives 93% as much light as the Earth from the sun, but only 1.5% of it. This is crucial because it is a red dwarf star that can emit high-energy radiation waves - high-energy radiation waves that could fry a planet and all life on the planet.
By contrast, stars like the Sun and Kepler-160 theory are more stable and better suited to the evolution of life.
Even when the sun is still during the solar minimum, it is active, with coronal holes opening in its atmosphere and sending glowing streams of energetic particles through the solar system in the fast solar wind. During a solar minimum, high-energy particles known as galactic cosmic rays can reach Earth and, in particular, our upper atmosphere. These particle streams interfere with communication with GPS and those that rely on satellites.
This week, NASA's Sun & Space account shared concerns about the solar minimum on Twitter. This full disk photo was taken on November 17, 2010 by NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory.
The interior of the sun consists of a core, radiation and convection zone from the inside out. The solar atmosphere consists of the photosphere, chromosphere and transition region, the corona. This highly diluted region of the chromosphere, the "corona," extends millions of kilometres into space and is only visible during total solar eclipses .
The moon and sun appear randomly in the sky, about the size of Earth. The moon enters an orbit around the Earth and the Sun as it orbits the Earth during a total solar eclipse .
Many spacecraft observe the sun to keep an eye on space weather, which can affect satellites and astronauts as well as Earth's atmosphere.
The core of the Sun is orbited by a series of satellites, each orbiting at a distance of about 2 million kilometres from Earth.
The visible surface of the sun sometimes shows dark sunspots, areas of intense magnetic activity that can lead to solar flares. They can be seen from Earth up to 2,000 kilometres from the sun.
Since the sun rotates faster near the equator and at higher latitudes, and its interior rotates faster than the surface, kinks and twists in the magnetic field develop. Sunspots are areas of intense magnetic activity, often roughly circular, originating from the outermost parts of the solar system, such as the innermost regions of the Sun.
These distortions produce features ranging from spectacular eruptions known as flares and coronal mass ejections to more subtle changes in the magnetic field, such as sunspot formation and sunburn.
The sun accounts for more than 90 percent of the solar system's total energy, and according to NASA, we would need 100 billion tons of dynamite per second to compete with the sun's energy. While coronal mass ejections are less violent and contain an unusually large amount of matter, flares are the most violent eruptions in our solar system, with a single ejection emitting up to 1,000 times as much energy as an atomic bomb into space.
The main method of searching for an exoplanet is to search for an object that is in orbit and passing in front of the star. They orbit so close to their star that they perform a revolution every 250 million years, according to the International Astronomical Union.
The best-known discovery of its kind is a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b, the existence of which was confirmed by a new study published this week. But the new exoplanet orbiting Kepler-160, published Thursday in Astronomy & Astrophysics, points to a very different situation. This has to do with the fact that red dwarfs are smaller than the sun and emit more energy in infrared radiation.