Astronomers find 17 red dwarf stars that may have aurorae triggered by orbiting Earth-sized planets

Following up on work presented last year with a single star, a team of astronomers has found evidence for planets orbiting quite a few nearby red dwarf stars, and they’ve done it in an entirely new way: By looking for aurorae on the stars themselves.

An aurora on Earth is caused when electrically charged subatomic particle (like electrons) in the Sun’s solar wind stream past the Earth and are caught by our planet’s magnetic field. The mechanism is pretty complex but in a nutshell these particle...