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The Sun occasionally produces flares — powerful bursts of energy that last from minutes to hours. Most are random, like raindrops hitting a roof. But sometimes one flare seems to ignite another: the second begins almost immediately after the first, even though they occur in different locations. Astronomers call these sympathetic flares.

For a long time, such paired flares were observed only on the Sun. On other stars, they were hard to detect reliably: stars are too far away, and flares can be faint and overlap in time. A team of researchers created a new algorithm that can distinguish even closely spaced flares. They applied it to data from the TESS space telescope, which monitors the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars.

In total, the scientists found about 220,000 flares on 16,000 stars, most of which are red dwarfs — small, cool stars. They looked at how often flares follow one another. If flares were completely random, the intervals between them would follow a specific distribution. But they found more short intervals than expected. This means that some flares trigger their neighbors.

This discovery shows that the Sun is not unique: small stars behave similarly. Perhaps the mechanism that triggers chains of flares is common to all such stars. Now astronomers can study it on thousands of objects, not just our own star.