Our sun ... viewed as a distant star

Looking at our sun as if it were a distant star enables searchers to evaluate it versus stars far far away. :)

Over the past decade, our study of the Sun has seen significant progress as multiple spacecraft have observed Earth's host star up close. And yet, there is still so much we don't know about the large star that greets our skies every day.

Chief among questions about the Sun might be what controls its violent flareups.

In order to answer this question, a team of astronomers recently took a counterintuitive approach. They took a step back, looking at the Sun as if it were a distant, unfamiliar star.

The new findings were detailed in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal, and not only gives scientists new insight about stellar activity, but helps them understand life around other stars as well.

“We wanted to know what a sunspot region would look like if we couldn’t resolve it in an image,” Shin Toriumi, a scientist at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “So, we used the solar data as if it came from a distant star to have a better connection between solar physics and stellar physics.”

How cool is that?