Astronomers have found the first clear evidence of a giant burst of charged gas from a distant star, marking a turning point in the study. space weather,
outrage came from one red dwarf star about 130 light years far inside spaceIt was identified as a coronal mass ejectionOr a CME, the kind of explosive event that many people have just witnessed Sun As a psychedelic auroraThose curtains of color in the sky are the result of giant clouds of magnetic plasma coming toward the planet and interacting with gases in Earth’s air,
Scientists have long wondered whether other stars also produce similar explosions. many exoplanets Orbit very close to their small, violent hosts. This proximity puts them in the firing line of stellar explosions that could strip them of their atmospheres. If these stars experienced frequent and powerful explosions, it is unlikely that life would be possible on nearby worlds.
Detection of CME beyond the Sun ends decades of speculation about it Other stars also explode like thisBefore this observation, researchers had only found clues such as sudden decreases or changes in the star’s brightness, But an international team was able to make the discovery by detecting a two-minute burst of radio waves racing away from the star,
“Such a radio signal would not exist unless the material completely left the bubble of the star’s powerful magnetism,” said Jo Callingham of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. a statement,
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Searchpublished in Nature This week, data from two major European observatories were used: the Low Frequency Array, a continent-wide network radio telescopeand the XMM-Newton space observatory, operated by the European Space Agency.
coronal mass ejection effect
As the CME travels, it generates a shock wave that dissipates radio waves sliding from high to low frequencies over time. The team identified this distinctive pattern in the signal from the red dwarf, known as StKM 1-1262, confirming that the explosion had broken free from the star’s magnetic field and escaped into the star. interstellar space,
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“This explosion would be devastating to planets around such a star,” Callingham saidFirst author of the paper.
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On Earth, the atmosphere and magnetic field provide the most protection to creatures harmful health effects of solar radiation during solar storms. But these events can destroy satellites and power grids. A Solar flare in March 1989For example, all of Quebec, Canada, experienced a 12-hour power outage. Due to this, the radio signals of Radio Free Europe were also jammed.
The red dwarf’s explosion was immense even by solar standards. The ejected material was moving at about 5.37 million miles per hour, a speed recorded in only a small fraction of the Sun’s CMEs. According to the research, such force would be enough to strip the atmosphere from any planet orbiting close to the star, exposing its surface to radiation and turning it into bald rock.
Red dwarf star systems and habitability
Astronomers don’t know whether rocky worlds orbiting close to red dwarf stars can retain their atmospheres.
Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/J. De Witt illustration
Red dwarfs like StKM 1-1262 are smaller and fainter than the Sun but much more active magnetically. They make up the majority of stars in the Milky Way and host the largest number of known Earth-sized planets. Because their habitable zones – areas in space where the temperature is just right for liquid water to form on the surface – are located so close to the stars, these planets are much more likely to experience stellar storms.
“It appears that intense space weather may be even more extreme around small stars – which are the primary hosts of potentially habitable exoplanets,” Henrik Eklund, a research fellow at the European Space Agency based in the Netherlands, said in a statement.
Scientists leading high-priority observation program NASA‘S James Webb Space Telescope The question they are trying to answer is whether the rocky planets orbiting these stars, also known as M-dwarfs, can retain their atmospheres.
Campaign, First reported by Mashable In 2024, Webb will be used to look for signs of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, using a new method for studying the atmosphere. secondary eclipse techniqueMeanwhile, the Hubble Space Telescope will focus on the stars themselves, studying their ultraviolet radiation output,
“If you found out that none of them had atmospheres, it would be very sad,” Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer who leads the program, told Mashable, “but it’s also quite interesting. It would mean that our planetary system is really, really special.”
Future observatories will build on this discovery to identify more stellar explosions and explore how they affect the environments of planets in the galaxy.