It regularly happens that solar storms strike the Earth, causing splendid northern lights and, if they are more intense (like the one in 2023), surges in our electrical networks. Our Sun, like all stars, is capricious, but his escapades are insignificant compared to the radio explosion that European astronomers found in the archives of PROMISESa gigantic network of radio telescopes spread across Europe.
A cataclysmic eruption on a small red dwarf located 133 light years from Earth, which lasted for an entire minute. An event ” at least 10,000 times more violent than known solar storms », explains astronomer Cyril Tasse. A discovery profoundly calling into question our certainties about the habitability of exoplanets found in the temperate zone of these stars, because red dwarfs have much more erratic and violent behavior than our Sun.
An extraordinary stellar explosion
By taking the 2016 data captured by PROMISESresearchers came across an abrupt radio peak, coming from a small red dwarf called StKM 1-1262. Despite its size, its magnetic activity is marked by rapid fluctuationscharacteristics of the most turbulent red dwarfs.
After analyzing the radio peak, the team confirmed that it was indeed a coronal mass ejection (CME), a phenomenon that has never been observed outside our Solar System.
In addition to being unprecedented, this EMC was so brutal that it probably released an equivalent electromagnetic energy in 60 seconds to several thousand of our solar storms combined. A flow of ionized particles powerful enough to tear away, layer by layer, the atmosphere of a planet in nearby orbit.
Even if StKM 1-1262 is not surrounded, according to the information we have, by any galactic neighbor, it offers us a new framework of analysis to better understand exoplanets. Indeed, this extrasolar explosion will force astronomers to review the criteria of these worlds “ potentially habitable »many of which orbit red dwarfs capable of producing similar phenomena.
For Philippe Zarka, research director at the Paris Observatory, this detection “ ushers in a new era for space weather applied to other star systems “. According to him, this field of study opens “ major insights into how the magnetic activity of stars influences the potential life of planets around them “. Perhaps we hadunderestimated the dynamics of these explosions in our quest for extraterrestrial life, while studying them more closely, nWe could precisely classify more precisely the planets that seem most promising to us. A progress that will perhaps put us on the right path, the one that will finally lead us towards the first oasis of extrasolar life.
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