Small star, mighty flares: ALMA shares new view of Proxima Centauri

At a distance of just over four light years, Proxima Centauri is our nearest stellar neighbor and is known to be a very active M dwarf star. Its flare activity has been well-known to astronomers using visible wavelengths of light, but a new study using observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) array highlights this star's extreme activity in radio and millimeter wavelengths, offering exciting insights about the particle nature of these flares as well as potential impacts to the livability of its terrestrial, habitable-zone planets.