Keeping Calm

Over the last four years, the brightness of the other stars fluctuated wildly, whereas the Sun stayed relatively constant, according to research published Friday in the journal Science. In fact, the difference between the Sun’s brightest and dimmest moments is a fifth the size of other stars.

“We wanted to see if the Sun is somehow different,” Max Planck Institute researcher Timo Reinhold told Inverse. “People have claimed that it’s more quiet than other stars, while others have claimed that it’s similarly active so we wanted to really boil it down to this very solar-like sample that is very similar to the Sun.”