By BlueShift | 2025-11-27

Astronomers recently identified a storm on a star other than our Sun for the first time, discovering an explosion so violent it could have stripped away the atmosphere of any nearby planets.

The discovery, published November 12 in the Nature journal, presents the strongest evidence yet of a distant coronal mass ejection (CME).

CMEs are huge eruptions of plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona.

The eruptions send clouds of charged particles through space at high speed and can cause geomagnetic storms and other disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere that can affect satellites, power grids and various types of technology.

Until now, the only definitive evidence of CMEs has been from our Sun.

Observing such a storm on a distant star had proven difficult for astronomers.

Older telescopes could not see any of the characteristic "drifting bursts" emanating from other stars, team member David C. Konijn of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) told the Nature podcast.

But using data from LOFAR, the Low Frequency Array, a large radio telescope network with more than 1,000 antenna stations in the Netherlands and across Europe, an international team of researchers has finally achieved the feat.

'Colossal stellar storm'

LOFAR, completed in 2012 by ASTRON and its international partners, is operated by the institute's radio observatory.

The new-generation radio interferometer uses a phased-array design optimized to cover the largely unexplored low frequency range between 30 and 240 MHz.

The team that made the stellar storm discovery has been using LOFAR since 2016 to detect the most extreme and violent events in the universe -- such as black holes -- which emit relatively stable radio signals over time.

"We always have stars in the telescope's field of view but generally we're not interested in them," study co-author Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory told AFP.

But the researchers set up a data processing system that also records what is going on with the stars behind the behemoths they are chasing. In 2022, the team decided to find out "what had been caught in this net," Tasse said.

They found there had been a huge, minute-long explosion on May 16, 2016 that came from a red dwarf star called StKM 1-1262, more than 133 light years away.

The team determined it was a CME -- a stellar storm -- "the first time we have detected one" on a star other than our own, Tasse said.

But this coronal mass ejection was "at least 10,000 times more violent than known solar storms" on the Sun, he added.

"The signal we detected was far more luminous and energetic than anything ever seen from our Sun -- a truly colossal stellar storm," Dutch-Australian radio astronomer Joe Callingham said in a post on ASTRON's website.

"If a planet were sitting in that star’s habitable zone, its atmosphere would be in serious trouble."

Discovery's implications

The discovery could have an impact on the search for planets beyond our solar system that have the potential to host life.

Red dwarfs, which have a mass of between 10 and 50% that of our Sun, are the most likely stars to host planets that are roughly the size of Earth.

"The first radio detection inaugurates a new era for space weather applied to other star systems," said study co-author Philippe Zarka, research director at the Paris Observatory.

"This emerging field opens up major perspectives for how the magnetic activity of stars influence the habitability of the planets that surround them."

Tasse said it appears red dwarf stars have "much more erratic and violent" behavior than the Sun.

"The implication is that these stars can be rather inhospitable when it comes to life and exoplanets," because they have storms so powerful they could destroy the atmospheres of planets nearby, he said.

For exoplanets orbiting a star, it is of "quite high importance how the star behaves," ASTRON's Konijn told the Nature podcast.

The discovery narrows down the factors for planets that may be able to support life, he said, noting that such planets would need water, for example, and must not be too far or too close from the star.

"Does the star produce so many particles it just strips away the atmosphere [of such planets] entirely?" is a question astronomers are asking, he said. "Because we assume that without an atmosphere you cannot have life on an exoplanet."

The burst identified on the red dwarf star StKM 1-1262 was "extremely bright," he said, but "we suspect there are other dimmer bursts" coming from other stars.

Astronomers are going to search through the same data set "very deliberately, very carefully" in search of some dimmer bursts, he said.

Netherlands' leading role

The Netherlands is one of the founding partners of the European Space Agency (ESA), and in October said it would contribute 344.3 million euros ($397.2 million) to the ESA over the next three years, European Space Flight reported.

The small European nation has a thriving space sector, known for its innovation and technological advancements, according to the Space Foundation.

It has gained a strong reputation in the field of radio astronomy.

Dutch contributions to the sector span the domains of solar system exploration, Earth and climate science, and commercial activities, the foundation said.

The Netherlands also has "particular expertise in scientific instrument design, small satellites and space craft propulsion, solar energy, and laser communication," it noted.

ASTRON, a world leader in the development of new instruments for astronomy, operates the LOFAR and Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT).

The institute also leads the coordination of the Dutch participation in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope, which is being constructed in South Africa and Australia.