Stars.

We know a lot about stars, don’t we?  After all, we live 93 million miles away from a very nice one.  When our lovely star leaves the sky for the night, we see thousands more of them.  If we look at the NASA.gov site, or HubbleSite, we can look at billions of them.  We know how they are born, how they age, how they die.  We can go to websites like STEREO or SOHO and see what our star looks like right now.  Not too long ago, I did a post on sunspots, which you can read here if you’re curious.  And, by the way, as I’m writing this post, this is what our sun looks like right now (from SOHO).  I mean, RIGHT NOW:

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Yes, it’s 1:06 am as I write this.  But that’s just our star.  Do all those billions of other stars act the same way as ours?  Do beings on other worlds see spots?  Flares?  Prominences?

To borrow someone’s (adjective deleted) phrase:  You betcha.

NASA conception of a red dwarf - looks familiar, doesn't it?

We only have to look at our star to visualize what’s happening on other stars.  After all; they’re basically the same things.  Using some very powerful telescopes, we’ve been able to see spots on Betelgeuse, flares on UV Ceti, and magnetic fluctuations on Proxima Centauri.

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To be honest, some of those distant suns do things we should be very thankful ours hasn’t.  Not if we don’t want to be fried to a crisp where we stand.  Since our star rises every morning, shines, then sets every evening, we get to thinking we live next to a pretty tame little ball of fire.

Don’t you believe it.

NASA Wolf Rayet ejecting clumps of gas at about 100,000 mph