Starspots: Revving up the variability of solar-like stars

In cosmic comparison, the Sun is a bore. While the brightness of some other stars with similar characteristics fluctuates strongly, the Sun's variations are much more moderate. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, from the Turkish-German University and Boğaziçi University in Turkey, and from Kyung Hee University in South Korea, have now investigated how exactly sun- and starspots affect this behavior. In addition to the number and size of the spo...