The sun, like all stars, is a blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma. From its surface emerge magnetic field lines that can cause dark patches known as sunspots. Turn up the activity of these magnetic whorls, and you get more solar storms flinging deadly charged particles and radiation throughout our solar system. If enough of these punishing waves hit a rocky planet, that planet might end up microwaved into a dreary condition where nothing could live.

So how is it that we’re alive? A study released Thursday in the journal Science suggests that our sun is rather tame compared with its stellar siblings, and that hundreds of other sun-like stars in our galaxy have on average five times more magnetic activity than our parent star. In other words, the sun is a bit humdrum, which might be good for life here on Earth.

Astronomers have been tracking the appearance of sunspots since the time of Galileo, providing a proxy for solar activity stretching back four centuries. Some previous studies also implied that the sun was quieter than other similar stars. But competing evidence has also found the sun’s activity level is normal for stars of its size.

“This triggered the question: ‘Is the sun a real sun-like star?’” said Timo Reinhold, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and co-author of the paper.