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\n Artist\u2019s impression of a coronal mass ejection on a star<\/p>\n Olena Shmahalo\/Callingham et al.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n A cloud of plasma ejected by a star 40 light years away has been detected by a radio telescope on Earth, giving astronomers their first definitive observation of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from a star beyond our sun.<\/p>\n CMEs occur when storms on the surface of a star fling out bubbles of magnetised plasma into space. Such eruptions from our sun produce the auroras we see on Earth, but they can also be powerful enough to rip the atmosphere away from Venus, which is closer to the sun and isn\u2019t protected by a magnetic field.<\/p>\n Scientists have seen hints of CMEs on distant stars for decades, but have been unable to prove that material actually escaped the stars\u2019 gravitational and magnetic pull, rather than just leaping up from the surface before being drawn back in.<\/p>\n Now, Joseph Callingham at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and his colleagues have used\u00a0the\u00a0Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope in the Netherlands to pick up a burst, or radio waves, emitted by a CME as it travelled through space.<\/span>\u00a0These signals would be possible to detect only if the ejection had completely left the star StKM 1-1262, from which it originated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The team also used the space-based X-ray telescope XMM-Newton to determine the originating star\u2019s temperature, rotation and brightness.<\/p>\n Callingham says prior observations suggested that CMEs happened on distant stars, but that this new data is the smoking gun that confirms it. \u201cYou could argue that we\u2019ve had hints for 30 years, and that\u2019s true, but we never explicitly proved it,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re saying that mass has been ejected, has been lost from the star, and that\u2019s always been a debate in the literature.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The radiation from the ejection would have been powerful enough to jeopardise any nearby life forms. Anthony Yeates at Durham University, UK, says greater knowledge of the frequency and magnitude of CMEs from distant stars should be incorporated into models about the potential habitability of exoplanets.\u00a0\u201cIf there was an exoplanet, it would have been quite catastrophic for any life on it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Topics:<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\n