Sun sluggish star compared to others of its ilk

Mercury is an evening planet this month, setting 80 to 90 minutes after the Sun during the first half of June.

On the 20th it is stationary, after which the planet quite rapidly moves back towards the Sun through the rest of the month.

It also becomes much fainter and will be completely lost to view towards the end of the month. Venus was at inferior conjunction, between Earth and Sun, on June 4, so it is too close to the Sun for observation early in June.

After conjunction it becomes a morning object. By mid-June, Venus will rise 90 minutes before the Sun. It will be a prominent morning object for the rest of June.

Mars rises close to midnight all month so is essentially a morning object. It moves from Aquarius to Pisces on the 24th. On the morning of June 13, the Moon, just before last quarter, will be about 5 degrees above Mars.

Next morning Mars will be less than 2 degrees from Neptune. Jupiter and Saturn remain a close pair during June, with Jupiter leading Saturn by about 5 degrees early in the month. They are becoming well placed for viewing in the late-evening sky.

During June the planets are retrograding, the faster movement of Jupiter takes it further ahead of Saturn. Their separation will increase by about a degree.

The southern mid-winter solstice is on June 21, at 9am. On that day we will receive the fewest sunlight hours for the year.

Close up photographs and videos of the Sun make it out to be a fearsome place. Recently, however, astronomers have found that it is surprisingly sluggish compared to other middle-age stars of its ilk.

The activity of the Sun is measured by the number of solar flares and sunspots it has and these appear and disappear in a regular 11-year cycle. At its peak there can be hundreds of sunspots and eruptions, lobbing streams of radiation into space, creating spectacular aurora. The Sun has just passed the minimum point of what was the weakest cycle in the past 200 years.

The next solar cycle, predicted to peak around 2025, could be even weaker. There are theories that it is transitioning to a lower-activity state. Evidence of solar radiation captured in drill cores from the North and South Poles suggest our Sun's quiet times have lasted for 9000 years.

The new research calculated changes in the brightness and variability of 369 stars around the same age, temperature, mass and composition as our Sun, using data from the Kepler space telescope. The typical sun-like star observed by Kepler is quite a bit noisier than the Sun.

The stars, which were observed for four years, had up to five times the amount of sunspot activity as our Sun at its peak.

Sunspot activity suggests the stars would have stronger flares, possibility affecting the habitability of planets around them.