Huge cloud of plasma belched out by star 130 light years away

A cloud of plasma ejected by a star 130 light-years away has been detected by a radio telescope on Earth, giving astronomers their first definitive observation of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from a star beyond our sun.

CMEs occur when storms on a star’s surface throw bubbles of magnetized plasma into space. Such flares from our sun produce the auroras we see on Earth, but they can also be powerful enough to tear away the atmosphere of Venus, which is closer to the sun and not protected by a magnetic field.

Scientists have observed evidence of CMEs on distant stars for decades, but have been unable to prove that the matter actually escapes the stars’ gravitational and magnetic pull, rather than simply leaping from the surface before being pulled there.

Now, Joseph Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and his colleagues used the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands to capture a burst, or radio waves, emitted by a CME as it travels through space. These the signals could only be detected if the ejection had completely left the star StKM 1-1262, where it originated.

The team also used the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope to determine the temperature, rotation and brightness of the original star.

Callingham says previous observations suggested CMEs were occurring on distant stars, but this new data is the compelling evidence that confirms it. “You could argue that we’ve had evidence for 30 years, and that’s true, but we’ve never proven it explicitly,” he says. “We say the mass was ejected, was lost from the star, and that’s always been a debate in the literature.”

The radiation from the ejection would have been powerful enough to endanger any nearby life. Anthony Yeates of the University of Durham, UK, says that better knowledge of the frequency and magnitude of CMEs from distant stars should be incorporated into models of the potential habitability of exoplanets. “If there was an exoplanet, it would have been catastrophic for all life on it,” he says.

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