Astronomers discovered the first clear evidence of a charged gas giant erupting from a distant star, a landmark achievement in the study of space weather.
The explosion came from a red dwarf star about 130 light years away. The phenomenon was identified as a coronal mass ejection (CME), a type of explosion that many people have recently witnessed from the sun in the form of colorful auroras.
The curtain of light in the sky occurs when a large cloud of magnetized plasma hurtles toward Earth and interacts with gases in the atmosphere.
Scientists have long wondered whether other stars also produce similar explosions. Many exoplanets orbit very close to their small but active host stars. ‘
That proximity puts the planet at direct risk of being hit by a stellar explosion that could erode its atmosphere. If these stars frequently release powerful explosions, it is unlikely that the world around them can support life.
The detection of a CME outside the sun ends decades of speculation about whether other stars also trigger similar eruptions. Prior to this observation, researchers only found clues in the form of sudden dimming or changes in starlight.
However, an international team succeeded in making this discovery by detecting a two-minute flash of radio waves that shot away from the star.
“A radio signal like this would not have formed unless the material had completely escaped the bubble of the star’s strong magnetism,” said Joe Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in a statement.
The findings, published in the journal Nature this week, used data from two large observatories in Europe: the Low Frequency Array, a Europe-wide network of radio telescopes and XMM-Newton, the European Space Agency’s space observatory.
Impact of Coronal Mass Ejection
As the CME accelerates, it produces a shock wave that emits radio waves whose frequency decreases from high to low over time.
‘The research team identified this distinctive pattern in signals from a red dwarf star named StKM 1-1262, confirming that the burst had escaped the star’s magnetic field and hurtled into interstellar space.
“An explosion like this would destroy a planet orbiting the star,” said Callingham, the study’s lead author.
On Earth, the atmosphere and magnetic field protect living things from the most dangerous health effects of solar radiation during solar storms. However, such an event could cripple satellites and power grids.
In March 1989, for example, a solar storm caused all of Quebec, Canada, to experience a 12-hour power outage. The incident also disrupted Radio Free Europe’s radio signal.
These outbursts from red dwarf stars are even more extreme than standard solar storms. The ejected material moved at about 5.37 million mph (about 8.64 million km/h), a speed that has only been recorded in a small fraction of solar CMEs.
This amount of force is enough to strip the atmosphere of any planet orbiting close to the star, leaving its surface exposed to radiation and turned into barren rock, according to the study.
Red Dwarf Star Systems and Habitability
Red dwarf stars like StKM 1-1262 are smaller and dimmer than the sun, but much more magnetically active. They are the most common type of star in the Milky Way and home to the largest number of known Earth-sized planets.
Because their habitable zones, the region that allows liquid water, are much closer together, these planets are likely to be hit by stellar storms more often.
“It seems that extreme space weather can be much more violent around smaller stars, the main hosts of potentially habitable exoplanets,” said Henrik Eklund, a researcher at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands.
Scientists leading a high-priority observation program using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are trying to answer the question of whether rocky planets orbiting such small stars, also called M-dwarfs, can retain their atmospheres.
The campaign, first reported by Mashable in 2024, will use Webb to look for signs of carbon dioxide, a heat-absorbing gas, using a new method called the secondary eclipse technique. Meanwhile, the Hubble Telescope will focus on observing the star itself, studying its emission of ultraviolet radiation.
“If it turns out that none of them have an atmosphere, that would be quite sad,” Néstor Espinoza, the astronomer who led the program, told Mashable, “but also very exciting. It would mean that our planetary system is actually really special.”
Future observatories will leverage these findings to identify more stellar explosions and map how they impact planetary environments across the galaxy.
