A new study has revealed that temperamental stars that brighten and dim over the course of just a few hours could be distorting astronomers' views of thousands of planets beyond the solar system.
The team behind this research reached this conclusion by studying 20 extrasolar planets or "exoplanets" as they crossed, or "transited," the faces of their parent stars using the Hubble Space Telescope. This revealed that starlight fluctuations caused by hotter and colder regions on the stars' surfaces were more responsible for distorting interpretations of exoplanet atmospheres than previously thought.
