When a bell rings, the sound doesn't stop abruptly — it fades gradually. Solar flares behave similarly. At the moment of a flare, magnetic fields suddenly reconfigure, and oscillations arise in the hot gas of the Sun's atmosphere — as if a giant tuning fork had been struck. These damped pulsations (rhythmic flickering) tell us that something inside the star is "ringing".

To find a common rhythm in this "ringing", scientists analyzed more than two thousand microflares and three hundred ordinary ones. Using precise brightness measurements and special signal processing, they extracted pure periodic oscillations from the flickering. Then the data went through frequency analysis and statistical model comparison. It turned out that the damping time τ and the pulsation period P are related by a power law: τ ∝ P^α, where α ≈ 0.9. In other words, the longer one "swing" lasts, the longer all oscillations take to decay — and this line on the graph is the same for barely visible microflares and monstrous stellar explosions.

Such a universal law implies that the same mechanism drives damping everywhere — most likely magnetic waves in the gas (the very ones that make loops vibrate). But the key point is that pulsations now become a measuring tool. By measuring the period, you can calculate the length of an invisible plasma loop; knowing the damping time, you can estimate its temperature. For red dwarf stars, too far away to see loops in telescopes, this is invaluable. Moreover, by comparing the "ringing" of flares at different wavelengths — for example, in ultraviolet and X-ray — scientists will learn to distinguish types of oscillations and determine even more precisely what is hidden in the tumultuous atmosphere of a star. Thus, observations of how flares fade open a path to understanding the life cycle of stars — and the "bell ringing" of distant suns will reveal their invisible properties.