Solar Flare Domino Effect Also Seen in Thousands of Stars

A surprising discovery reveals that the domino-like solar eruptions are not exclusive to the Sun but also occur in thousands of stars throughout our galaxy. This finding, conducted by a team at Tufts University and published in The Astrophysical Journal, broadens our understanding of stellar energy dynamics. Led by PhD student Veronica Pratt, the research shows that sympathetic flares — secondary events triggered by an initial energetic eruption — happen in common stars, not just our Sun.

Until now, astrophysicists knew that about 5% of solar flares produce these secondary events, but there was no evidence they were a universal pattern in other stars. The study analyzed data from over 16,000 stars observed by NASA’s Transit Survey Satellite (TSS), a project aimed at finding potentially habitable exoplanets in distant galaxies. The team used a specialized algorithm called TOFFEE to detect and differentiate related eruptions from independent ones, analyzing more than 200,000 stellar events.

The results showed that the occurrence rate of sympathetic flares ranges between 4% and 9%, similar to the Sun’s. This suggests a universal mechanism behind these energetic explosions across different types of stars. The breakthrough was possible thanks to TOFFEE, an algorithm that distinguishes whether a rapid series of flashes are related events or random coincidences. The presence of this pattern in so many stars indicates that the energetic processes driving solar eruptions are also active elsewhere in the galaxy, raising new questions about stellar physics and magnetic activity on a galactic scale.