There is one very big difference in our ability to study stars, whhich is what I am doing here in Armagh (or trying to do;-)). Because of the huge distances we are able to see stars only as a point sources (even with the largest telescopes) thus we can not see any details on their surfaces!!! That makes my job and that of my colleagues much more difficult. We have to use the knowledge from our colleagues who study the Sun and find similar events on other stars. As you have seen people who study the Sun are interested in very small details. There are very few people or groups of people who study Sun as a star.
Other stars like the Sun have chromospheres, coronae, spots and some of them show different levels of activity. We are probably very lucky that our Sun is very quiet compared to some other stars. For example there are stars which have flares milions of times stronger than the strongest flare recorded on the SUN. And probably you have read about what can happened in the case of really strong flare (**** I hope that someone is giving info about power disruptions in Canada few years ago***)
I study stellar flares and stellar chromospheres in general and here I will show you some thing I am doing.
Stellar flares are similar to those we observe on the Sun. We observe flares using big telescopes and instruments attached to them. Here is the a of spectra of the star AD Leo, recorded every three seconds on a four meter telescope on the island of La Palma. The bright strip in the middle of the picture shows the beginning of the flare.
Beside traveling to nice places all around the world to make the observations I have to do data reductions and modelling. Modelling means solving some equations using as much computer power as I can get and comparing the results with the observational data.
Here is a plot of calculations I have done some time ago which compares observed and modelled flare data on the very active star AD Leo.
