In a First, Astronomers Saw a Distant Star Shoot Some of Its Plasma Into Space

The powerful coronal mass ejection would have likely destroyed the atmospheres of any potentially habitable planets nearby

Sara Hashemi - Daily Correspondent

November 17, 2025 4:46 p.m.

An artist's impression of a coronal mass ejection on a star Olena Shmahalo / Callingham et al.

For the first time, astronomers confirmed a massive expulsion of plasma from a star other than the sun. A burping star about 130 light-years from Earth spat out the cloud of electrically charged gas, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), from its outer atmosphere.

Moreover, researchers estimate the expelled star matter was dense enough and traveling fast enough to strip away the atmosphere of any nearby habitable planets, exposing their surfaces—and any possible lifeforms there—to extreme radiation. The findings were published in the journal Nature on November 12.

CMEs from our sun can have severe effects on Earth, from driving radio blackouts to supercharging auroras. But scientists had never seen one anywhere else in the universe.

“Astronomers have wanted to spot a CME on another star for decades,” lead author Joe Callingham, an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, says in a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA). Past observations “hinted at their presence but haven’t actually confirmed that material has definitively escaped out into space.”

Callingham and his colleagues spotted the stellar belch using the Low Frequency Array radio telescope, comprised of thousands of antennas spread across Europe. The team observed patches of the sky continuously over eight hours and saw a type II radio burst, a brief explosion of radio waves associated with a CME emerging from a star’s atmosphere, per Daniel Clery at Science.

“It’s a smoking-gun signature of a CME happening,” Callingham says to the outlet.

The type II radio burst’s detection “provides what is likely the strongest evidence yet that this phenomenon occurs beyond the solar system,” Kevin France, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the research, tells Kasha Patel at the Washington Post.

The radio waves came from a star called StKM 1-1262, which additional observations with the ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope confirmed is a red dwarf, as reported by Live Science’s Elizabeth Howell. These stars are cooler, smaller and dimmer than the sun. But they are also more active than the sun, meaning they likely shoot off more CMEs.

Follow-up data also revealed the ejected material’s rotation and brightness, which hinted that the CME was traveling at roughly 1,500 miles per second. That’s an extremely fast speed seen in only 5 percent of similar outbursts on the sun, per Live Science.

The team says the observed blast would have been strong enough to wipe away the protective atmosphere of any Earth-like planets within StKM 1-1262’s habitable zone. That special region is just the right distance from a star for liquid water—thought to be essential for life—to pool on a planet’s surface.

Such powerful plasma eruptions on distant stars may affect the search for life on planets outside the solar system.

After getting hit, “the atmosphere and basically the planet itself will be exposed completely to the solar wind plasma and the CME plasma, which is bad news,” Julián Alvarado-Gómez, an astrophysicist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam who was not involved in the study, tells Science. “Sometimes you only need one of these big guys to come your way.”

Did you know? NASA's exoplanet database recently hit a huge milestone

Researchers are celebrating an exoplanet-palooza: They've confirmed more than 6,000 planets floating beyond the solar system, as of September 2025. The first two, nicknamed Poltergeist and Phobetor, were discovered in 1992.

And since many habitable-zone exoplanets discovered so far orbit red dwarfs—one of the most common types of star in the Milky Way—that’s a bad sign for their potential to support life.

“Intense space weather may be even more extreme around smaller stars—the primary hosts of potentially habitable exoplanets,” Henrik Eklund, a solar physicist at the European Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands, says in the statement. “This has important implications for how these planets keep hold of their atmospheres and possibly remain habitable over time.”

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