Stephen Bourke of Onsala Space Observatory, in Sweden, and Aaron Golden of NUI Galway, working with an international team, succeeded earlier this month in catching the stellar flare exploding in the star’s atmosphere. They are using I-Lofar, the low-frequency radio telescope at Birr, in Co Offaly, and the international array of such telescopes to which it belongs to understand how such flares evolve and how they compare to solar flares. CN Leo is a small red dwarf star about 7.9 light years – almost 75 trillion kilometres – away, in the constellation Leo, and is likely to have a planetary system, according to Dr Golden. “In fact we now know that the vast majority of stars in the galaxy that have planetary systems that could harbour habitable planets orbit red dwarf stars like CN Leo. It’s more like recording ripples in a pond, according to Dr Golden, and requires “a fair amount of computing power”.

Source: The Irish Times March 27, 2018 14:48 UTC