Using AI to help understand the evolution of young stars and their planets

A stellar flare is a sudden flash of increased brightness on a star. Young stars are prone to these flares which can incinerate everything around them, including the atmospheres of nearby planets starting to form. Finding out how often young stars erupt can help scientists understand where to look for habitable planets. But until now, searching for these flares involved poring over thousands of measurements of star brightness variations, called'light curves', by eye. Now, an international team of scientists based in Australia and the USA have used machine learning to make the search faster and more effective.