Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2026

47 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING out into space. We’ve now managed to do this for the first time.” As a CME travels through the layers of a star out into interplanetary space, it produces a shock wave and associated burst of radio waves (a type of light). This short, intense radio signal was picked up by Joe and colleagues and found to come from a star lying around 130 light-years away. “This kind of radio signal just wouldn’t exist unless ma- terial had completely left the star’s bubble of powerful mag- netism,” adds Joe. “In other words: it’s caused by a CME.” The matter- flinging star is a red dwarf – a type of star far fainter, cooler, and smaller than the Sun. It is nothing like our own star: it has roughly half the mass, it rotates 20 times faster, and has a magnetic field 300 times more powerful. Most of the planets known to exist in the Milky Way orbit this kind of star. The radio signal was spotted using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope thanks to new data processing methods developed by co-authors Cyril Tasse and Philippe Zarka at the Observatoire de Paris- PSL. The team then used ESA’s XMM-Newton to determine the star’s temperature, rotation, and brightness in X-ray light. This was essential to interpret the radio sig- nal and figure out what was ac- tually going on. “We needed the sensitivity and frequency of LOFAR to detect the radio waves,” says co-author David Konijn, a PhD stu- dent working with Joe at ASTRON. “And without XMM-Newton, we wouldn’t have been able to deter- mine the CME’s motion or put it in a solar context, both crucial for proving what we’d found. Neither derstanding eruptions and space weather around other stars,” adds Henrik Eklund, an ESA research fellow based at the European Space Research and Tech- nology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, The Nether- lands. “We’re no longer limited to extrapolating our understanding of the Sun's CMEs to other stars. It seems that in- tense space weather may be even more extreme around smaller stars – the primary hosts of po- tentially habitable exoplanets. This has important implications for how these planets keep hold of their at- mospheres and possibly remain hab- itable over time.” The finding also informs our understanding of space weather, something that’s long been a focus for ESA missions and is currently being explored by SOHO, the Proba missions, Swarm, and Solar Orbiter. XMM-Newton, meanwhile, is a leading explorer of the hot and ex- treme Universe. Launched in 1999, the space telescope has gazed into the cores of galaxies, studied stars to understand how they evolve, in- vestigated the environs of black holes, and spotted intense bursts of energetic radiation from distant stars and galaxies. “XMM-Newton is now helping us discover how CMEs vary by star, something that’s not only interesting in our study of stars and our Sun, but also our hunt for habitable worlds around other stars,” says ESA XMM-Newton Proj- ect Scientist Erik Kuulkers. “It also demonstrates the immense power of collaboration, which underpins all successful science. The discovery was a true team effort, and resolves the decades-long search for CMEs beyond the Sun.” A n artist's impression of XMM-Newton. [ESA-C. Carreau] telescope alone would have been enough – we needed both.” The researchers determined the CME to be moving at a super-fast 2400 km per second, a speed only seen in 1 of every 2000 CMEs taking place on the Sun. The ejection was both fast and dense enough to completely strip away the atmospheres of any planets closely orbiting the star. he atmosphere-stripping ability of the CME is an exciting discovery for our hunt for life around other stars. A planet’s habitability for life, as we know it, is defined by its distance from its parent star – whether or not it sits within the star’s ‘habitable zone’, a region where liquid water can exist on the surface of planets with suitable atmospheres. This is a Goldilocks scenario: too close to the star is too hot, too far is too cold, and in between is just right. But what if that star is especially active, regularly throwing out dangerous eruptions of material and triggering violent storms? A planet regularly bombarded by powerful coronal mass ejections may lose its atmos- phere entirely, leaving a barren rock behind – an uninhabitable world, despite its orbit being ‘just right’. “This work opens up a new observa- tional frontier for studying and un- !