First stellar Coronal Mass Ejection detected beyond our Sun
- Reference: 1762968850
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/12/scientists_spot_a_huge_explosion/
- Source link:
CME events are a regular occurrence at our sun. Massive amounts of material are emitted and flood nearby space. Some can create the dazzling auroras seen in the sky from Earth as they interact with the magnetosphere, but they can also negatively impact space weather and disrupt spacecraft.
CMEs can erode the atmosphere of planets too, but until this observation, researchers had to extrapolate their understanding of the Sun's CMEs to other stars.
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"Previous findings have inferred that they exist, or hinted at their presence," said Joe Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), author of the new research published in Nature, "but haven't actually confirmed that material has definitively escaped out into space. We've now managed to do this for the first time."
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The CME was determined to be moving at 2,400 km per second – a speed only seen once in every 2,000 CMEs from the Sun – and was both fast and dense enough to completely strip away the atmospheres of any planets closely orbiting the star.
A planet's habitability for life as it is understood on Earth depends on whether or not it is situated within the star's 'habitable zone' – somewhere where liquid water and an atmosphere can exist. However, if a planet is bombarded with powerful CMEs, it might lose its atmosphere entirely despite its orbit being 'just right'.
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The radio signal generated by the CME was detected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope. "This kind of radio signal just wouldn't exist unless material had completely left the star’s bubble of powerful magnetism," said Callingham, "In other words: it's caused by a CME."
The European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton telescope was then used to determine the star's temperature, rotation, and brightness in X-ray light. The report notes, "This was essential to interpret the radio signal and figure out what was actually going on."
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[6]Dwarf planet Ceres may have been habitable - for microbes - a couple of billion years back
[7]ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews
[8]NASA tests shrinking metals to help it find more exoplanets
[9]1.5 TB of James Webb Space Telescope data just hit the internet
The CME flinger was a red dwarf, as are many stars in the Milky Way that have planets orbiting them. It has roughly half the mass of the Sun, rotates 20 times faster, and has a magnetic field 300 times more powerful. It's also 130 light years from here.
Henrik Eklund, an ESA research fellow based at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, said, "It seems that intense space weather may be even more extreme around smaller stars – the primary hosts of potentially habitable exoplanets.
"This has important implications for how these planets keep hold of their atmospheres and possibly remain habitable over time."
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ESA's XMM-Newton x-ray space observatory is one of the agency's longest-lived missions, launched in 1999 and currently funded through 2026. However, when The Register [11]spoke to the team in 2020, the hope was that the spacecraft could be kept operating into the 2030s.
ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist Erik Kuulkers said, "XMM-Newton is now helping us discover how CMEs vary by star, something that's not only interesting in our study of stars and our Sun, but also our hunt for habitable worlds around other stars.
"It also demonstrates the immense power of collaboration, which underpins all successful science. The discovery was a true team effort, and resolves the decades-long search for CMEs beyond the Sun." ®
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[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/01/xmm-newton/
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It's locked and I couldn't find a preprint.
Since it's in Nature, and there was a press release, I expect it was under embargo.
FWIW, the detected event occurred May 2016; this result was obtained by mining old/existing data. Not that this was announced first off; you have to skim/read all the way past the references and into the "Methods" section to find this out.
Re: It's locked and I couldn't find a preprint.
Well, it actually happened in Mai 1886, we just only got the news now...
(That's exactly the same time Dr. John Pemberton invented Coca Cola™. Hmmm...)
Re: It's locked and I couldn't find a preprint.
Don't worry about when it happened. I can guarantee that the evening it reaches us will be cloudy. Just like tonight is for our star's latest CME
Re: It's locked and I couldn't find a preprint.
There's a rule. It's always cloudy when there's something interesting in the sky. Or at least, where I am.
Re: It's locked and I couldn't find a preprint.
It's everywhere the same, it's a subcategory of Murphy's Law.
You say that, but are all M dwarfs rotating 20 times faster than Sol with a magnetic field 300 times stronger? I think those are probably the relevant parameters for the strength of CMEs, alongside having half the mass. Logically, the strength of CMEs would be a function of the strength of the magnetic field, and off the star's gravitational pull (so the mass); is the stronger field due to the faster spin, the lower mass, a different elemental composition (perhaps higher metal* content?), or some combination of these things?
All this really tells us is that we can detect whopping great big CMEs that take place 130 ly away, and the fact that astronomers have been looking for them for a while implies that ones of this magnitude, or the stars that produce them, are perhaps not that common.
*In astrophysics, any element other than hydrogen or helium is considered a "metal"; obviously, chemists have a different opinion on this; it's a great example of the balkanisation of science, where different disciplines diverge because they aren't talking to each other properly.
Indeed, there was some generalization happening in this article. Because I wonder what would happen if our Sun was rotating 20 times faster and had a magnetic field 300 stronger. Its CMEs would certainly strip the atmosphere off all planets, it probably might even strip the planets off their atmospheres... (Seriously now, planets would had never been able to form, since the CMEs of the young Sun would had immediately depleted the initial dust cloud.)
Red dwarfs are prone to flares, we already know that. I guess the only real news here is that they managed to find one so powerful they were actually able to measure it, and while that's big news for astrophysicists, it's quite uninteresting for the wider audience. Which is probably the reason of the "OMG they are all dead now!" perspective.
>Red dwarfs are prone to flares
Well it was quite a few years ago
"The CME flinger was a red dwarf, as are many stars in the Milky Way that have planets orbiting them."
I'm sure it's more likely to be a garbage pod.
No, Quagaars. Double A, actually.
Red dwarfs are dead zones
One thing that is not considered is that Red Dwarf stars are a dead zone. If not for the lack of usable energy. Then for those insane flares that kill everything in their path. Large stars are also dead zones for different reason, but also large solar flares. The space science community seems to ignore this for the wishful thinking that there is life around such stars. So far they have been searching and finding what I've always expected them to find. Nothing but dead planets that have always been dead and if they are not dead planets, then the Red Dwarf makes sure that those planets remain dead with its flare activity that kills anything that might have started living in such star system.
Sorry for my confusing English.
[1]This is the paper. It's locked and I couldn't find a preprint. The star is StKM 1-1262. And that reads like another nail in the coffin for those who think M dwarfs could have habitable planets.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09715-3