For the first time, scientists have definitively observed a coronal mass ejection from a star beyond our sun, 130 light years away. The event was detected using a radio telescope in the Netherlands, confirming that plasma escaped the star's gravitational pull. This discovery raises concerns about the habitability of nearby exoplanets.
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are powerful eruptions of magnetized plasma from stellar surfaces, known to occur on the sun and produce auroras on Earth. However, confirming such events on distant stars has proven challenging, with decades of hints but no proof that material truly escapes into space.
Now, researchers led by Joseph Callingham at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy have used the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands to detect radio waves from a CME originating from the star StKM 1-1262, located 130 light years away. The signals indicate that the plasma cloud fully escaped the star's gravitational and magnetic influence. The team supplemented this with observations from the space-based X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, which measured the star's temperature, rotation, and brightness.
Callingham emphasized the significance: “You could argue that we’ve had hints for 30 years, and that’s true, but we never explicitly proved it. We’re saying that mass has been ejected, has been lost from the star, and that’s always been a debate in the literature.”
The ejection's radiation would have been intense enough to threaten life on any nearby exoplanets. Anthony Yeates at Durham University, UK, noted, “If there was an exoplanet, it would have been quite catastrophic for any life on it.” This finding, published in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09715-3), underscores the need to factor stellar CMEs into exoplanet habitability models, potentially explaining atmospheric erosion similar to what has affected Venus in our solar system.