When scientists go looking for alien exoplanets — ones that sit far outside our solar system — they rely entirely on those planets' host stars. Measuring the way a star's light appears to flicker and dim from Earth's perspective allows scientists to calculate an astonishing number of things about the planets transiting around that star, including whether it's the right size and distance from its star to hold liquid water. But to make those calculations, you need accurate stellar measurements. Otherwise, you might misjudge the size of a planet. That's a problem when you're looking for worlds that could host life as we know it, since you want to track down planets that are small and rocky like Earth.

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Lots of the stars imaged by the Kepler space telescope are too far away or dim for scientists to study the planets around them effectively. That's where the new technique, called the autocorrelation function timescale technique (timescale technique for short) comes in. Led by University of Vienna's Thomas Kallinger, researchers from Europe, Canada and Australia determined that using the timescale of variations in a star's brightness might be more accurate for determining gravity than the degree of brightness itself.

When they tested the timescale method on stars that are close enough to be studied with standard techniques, they found it to be about six times more accurate than the flicker method, which was developed in 2013 to study distant, dim stars by measuring the brightness of short variations caused by the bubbling of the star's gas.

As techniques like these continue to improve, scientists will be able to confidently study increasingly distant worlds, widening our net in the search for life.

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