The star’s eruption was similar to the gargantuan blasts that our Sun routinely unleashes into space, like the solar storms that recently gave us our night-time light shows. This, however, is on a much, much bigger scale. Literally.
In fact, the coronal mass ejection discover “a profoundly more damaging effect” on a planet within the star’s immediate neighborhood, the new study found.
This eruption was a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME. These events are huge blobs of plasma (highly ionized gas) and magnetic fields that rip away from the Sun’s outermost layer of atmosphere.
The ones that are big enough to hit the Earth’s glamorous field are what beget “space weather,” or geomagnetic disturbances. When Earth gets hit with these important solar storms, we get beautiful daybreaks near the poles. At the same time, the storms can inflict annihilation on the earth, frying global dispatches, knocking out the power grid, and taking satellite systems offline.
Scientists have been trying to directly first CME detected outside solar system launching off another star for a long time. They eventually managed to do it this week, when they published their results in the journal Nature.
The star, a red dwarf known as StKM 1- 1262, is about 130 light- times down from Earth. The speed at which the eruption was launched was 5.3 million long hauls per hour( 2,400 km/ s). Study lead author Cyril Tasse, a exploration associate at the Paris Observatory, says that they’ve only ever seen an ejection with that high of a speed in about one in 2,000 coronal mass ejections from the Sun.
“The star is a very strong and very rapidly rotating magnetic generator,” Tasse told Gizmodo. “The star behaves like an extremely magnetized, boiling bucket of plasma. This giant stellar explosion is 10 to 100 thousand times more powerful than the strongest the sun can produce. This opens a critical new window into extrasolar space weat
her.”