A star unleashed a planet-destroying flare

Skygazers can once again thank the sun for the latest round of Northern Lights that recently danced above much of the United States. Also known as the aurora borealis in the north, (or aurora australis in the Southern Hemisphere) these night sky events get their start on the sun’s surface after coronal mass ejections (CMEs) spew ionized clouds of high energy particles towards Earth. The radiation then interacts with the planet’s magnetosphere and generates the vivid colors in Earth’s atmosphere–as well as the occasional electrical grid and satellite array headache.

Astronomers first documented a CME in 1859, in conjunction with the widespread energy grid disruptions that later became known as the Carrington Event. Since then, every observed CME has traced back to the sun, but the streak is over: according to a study published in the journal Nature, astronomers finally confirmed a CME emitted by another star.

“Astronomers have wanted to spot a CME on another star for decades,” Joe Callingham, a study co-author and researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) said in a statement. “Previous findings have inferred that they exist, or hinted at their presence, but haven’t actually confirmed that material has definitively escaped out into space. We’ve now managed to do this for the first time.”

Callingham and colleagues at the European Space Agency (ESA) first suspected their potential interstellar CME after the LOFAR telescope array detected a short, intense radio signal emission from deep space. With help from the ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, the team traced the energy waves to a red dwarf located around 130 light-years away from Earth known as StKM 1-1262.

“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.”

A red dwarf is much cooler, smaller, and fainter than our yellow sun. StKM 1-1262 features a magnetic field that is about 300 times stronger than the sun, while only possessing half its mass. The confirmed interstellar CME was also blindingly fast, travelling around 1,491 miles per second. By comparison, only one in an estimated 2,000 of the sun’s CMEs match that speed. At that rate, the blast was fast and concentrated enough to destroy any nearby planet’s atmosphere.

While this major find is impressive on its own, it also has important implications across multiple fields of study. It’s particularly helpful to astronomers searching for habitable planets across the Milky Way galaxy. The so-called Goldilocks Zone refers to a planet orbiting within a star’s habitable region–one that is capable of sustaining liquid water and a protective atmosphere. Since most planets in the galaxy revolve around red dwarfs, it begs the question: do those stars regularly produce such devastating CMEs? If so, then the frequency and intensity of these stellar flares will need to be factored into the search for extraterrestrial life.

“It seems that intense space weather may be even more extreme around smaller stars–the primary hosts of potentially habitable exoplanets,” added ESA researcher and study co-author Henrik Eklund. “This has important implications for how these planets keep hold of their atmospheres and possibly remain habitable over time.”

 

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