![]() ![]() 11).īut young stars can be rough on their planets. They calm down by losing mass through their stellar winds and CMEs ( SN: 8/31/19, p. “What was the sun like in the past? What will it beįrom what we can tell, stars seem to tame their magnetic frenzies as they age. In its evolution,” says stellar physicist Travis Metcalfe of the Space Science More flares than the 4.6-billion-year-old sun.Ĭan use other stars to show snapshots of the sun at earlier and later periods Young sunlike stars of a few hundred million years have shorter cycles and emit Show signs of magnetic cycles of varying lengths depending on the stars’ ages. Stars share much of this magnetic fickleness. This polarity reversal has ripple effects on the solar wind that extend to the edges of the solar system. As the sun’s inner engine reorganizes itself, the south magnetic pole switches to the north, and vice versa. In another magnetic quirk, the direction of the sun’s dominant magnetic field flips at the peak of each cycle ( SN: 3/3/01, p. Sunspots, CMEs and bright radiation flashes called flares, while the minimum is Waxes and wanes in about an 11-year cycle. When strong CMEs hit Earth, they can fry satellites, shut down power grids and damage living cells. When tangled magnetic field lines on the solar surface suddenly snap, powerful eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections break free ( SN: 4/13/19, p. It can also batter unprotected planets scientists think the solar wind stripped away much of Mars’ atmosphere. That solar wind blows a bubble that defines the boundary of the solar system ( SN Online: 12/10/18). Those magnetic fields also help drive a stream of charged particles out into space ( SN Online: 8/11/17). Magnetic fields help heat the sun’s wispy outer atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees Celsius. The sun is the most familiar example: Our star’s temperamental behaviorĪnd periodic mood swings are thought to exist thanks to changes in magnetism. Fickle fieldsīest way to get to know a star is through its magnetic field, Alvarado Gómez Protect its planets from its own energetic outbursts. His research has also revealed how a star might Shift has brought Alvarado Gómez to some surprising differences between the sunĪnd other sunlike stars. at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. After an early focus on the sun, he shifted toward the Two years, he returned to school to study physics again. ![]() Occasional bonus for winning a tournament. There, he and Hernández earned a salary for playing at events, plus the The ring in the foreground is the Halo Array weapon. The fictional planet called Threshold almost eclipses its star, Soell, in this image from the Halo series of video games. The two caught theĪttention of Microsoft representatives looking for skilled players to helpĪdvertise the game by playing in public. Game offered a solution to his money woes when he came in third place in a Halo The way through an undergraduate physics degree at the National University ofĬolombia in Bogotá when financial trouble put his studies on hold. Gómez’s road to this stellar career was rocky. Offer details on how sunlike stars may affect potential life on their orbiting “sunlike” star, would shore up astronomers’ grasp of the sun. ![]() Star that has a similar mass and temperature as the sun, referred to as a Have one sun,” says the 35-year-old astrophysicist. Of the big difficulties we have in our understanding of the sun is that we only Like in its youth and how it influenced the start of life on Earth. This work will help him understand what our star was Stellar wind, the stream of energetic particles that defines a star’s territoryĪnd batters its planets. Goal is to map the star’s magnetic field over time along with its gusting Today, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center forĪstrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., he’s studying an actual star, Iota Horologii. As a young man in Bogotá, Colombia, he played Halo and Popular video game Halo and its fictional stars were Julián Alvarado Gómez’s Triggering the weapon, the Halo Array, wiped out the Flood, the Forerunners andĪll other intelligent life in the galaxy. As a last resort, the Forerunners builtĪ ring-shaped superweapon orbiting the moon of Soell’s largest planet. The ancient Forerunners fought a long war against ![]()
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