The researchers spot the first coronal mass ejection outside our solar system – it was massive

An intense X-ray flash, followed by the bursting of a huge plasma bubble – this is what researchers led by Costanza Argiroffi, researcher at the University of Palermo and associate researcher at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, have crown of HR 9024, an active star about 450 light-years away from us. This is the first CME ever seen in a star outside of our solar system.

The results help us better understand how CME appropriate in the lives of active stars across the universe and will help us to systematically study such dramatic events in the future.

Starburst

"The technique we used is based on monitoring plasma velocity during a stellar eruption," Costanza Argiroffi said. "This is because, by analogy with the solar environment, it is expected that, during a flare, the plasma confined in the coronal loop where the flare takes place is first moves up, then down, to reach the lower layers of the stellar atmosphere. "

"In addition, there should also be an extra move, always headed up, because of the FMC associated with the flare."

The team used data collected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to analyze a "particularly favorable" torch, according to a Chandra Observatory press release. Solar flares are sudden and quite violent events in which the brightness of a star increases considerably. Flares are sometimes, but not always, associated with CMEs.

The high energy transmission spectrometer (HETGS) embedded in Chandra is the only instrument available today that can be used to measure the movement of matter involved in CMEs. CMEs involve the expulsion of plasma – a very hot, electrically charged gas – into a star corona (atmosphere) at speeds of up to tens of thousands of miles per hour.

The results confirm that CMEs are only produced in magnetically active stars. The results also confirm the validity of what we know about CMEs so far, for example, that the material involved in a flare is very, very hot (of 18 to 45 million degrees Fahrenheit), traveling up and down with speeds ranging from 225,000 to 900,000 miles per hour.

"This result, never achieved before, confirms that our understanding of the main phenomena that occur in flares is solid," said Argiroffi. "We were not really convinced that our predictions could match observations, because our understanding of eruptions rests almost entirely on the observation of the solar environment, where the most extreme eruptions are a hundred thousand times less intense. the X -radiation issued. "

The "most important" discovery, however, is that after thrust, a body of many cooler Plasma (about 7 million degrees Fahrenheit) rises from the body of the star at "a steady speed of about 185,000 miles an hour," says Argiroffi. Such a result is "exactly what we could have expected for the CME associated with the flare."

The team adds that, according to Chandra's readings, the mass of the CME in question was approximately two billion pounds. That would be about ten thousand times more than the largest CMEs of the Sun. This latest candy reinforces the idea that more magnetically active stars generate larger scale versions of solar CMEs.

"The observed speed of CME is, however, much lower than expected. This suggests that the magnetic field in active stars is probably less efficient at accelerating CMEs than the solar magnetic field, "concludes Argiroffi.

The document "A mass ejection event by coronary burst illuminated by the movements of plasma X" was published in the newspaper Nature.