This is the view from a planet in a close orbit around a magnetic flare star. These stars have such gigantic episodes of magnetic activity that they must have huge starspots, some of which have actually been imaged. Life on a nearby planet would be i...

Gliese 229 is a red dwarf flare star some 19 light-years away in the constellation of Lepus (the Hare). In 1994, astronomers detected a companion object, Gliese 229b, which turned out to be a brown dwarf. Indeed it was the first such object ever to b...

... atmosphere but no water. To the left of Proxima is Alpha Centauri, a binary consisting of two Sun-like stars. Proxima is a flare star - it's highly magnetic and spews out streams of charged particles. If the world has its own magnetic field (like E ...