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"We found no X-rays emissions except for a bright flare," said Lars Bildsten, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "That was a real shock." Magnetic fields and flares are supposed to come from a "shear zone" inside stars where the inner core is in contact with a more fluid outer portion -- which rotate at different speeds. The differences in speed generate the magnetism, which can propagate outwards as tangled knots of energy and pop as flares. At least that's the story for sun-like stars. Dim dwarf stars, however, were not expected to have a shear zone inside them, said Bildsten. They were supposed to be convecting -- like a boiling pot -- from core to surface as low-level nuclear fusion kept them barely lit. This low-level fusion, which slowly converts hydrogen to helium, is also expected to allow these M-dwarf stars to live a very long time -- as long as the universe. It looks like that assumption was wrong, the researches say. What's more, despite the strangeness of TVLM513-46546, it's probably not all that different from other M-dwarfs. "They are more different than the sun then we expected," said astrophysicist Ansgar Reiners of Germany's Georg-August-Universitat in Gottingen. "I think we are in a phase that we're just trying to see what's out there." Related Links: Irene Klotz's blog: Space Diary |
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