Alien Space Weather Stations Orbiting Distant Stars Could Tell Us Where Life Exists

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Somewhere in deep space, giant rings of superheated plasma are swirling around alien stars like cosmic hula hoops—and scientists just realized they've been accidentally monitoring space weather this whole time.

A new peer-reviewed study from the Carnegie Institution for Science reveals that strange, repeating dips in starlight aren't glitches or starspots. They're naturally occurring weather stations, and they might finally help us figure out which exoplanets can actually support life.

Carnegie astronomer Luke Bouma, working with Moira Jardine of the University of St Andrews, discovered that these mysterious, recurring dips in brightness around certain young M dwarf stars aren't caused by starspots or passing debris. They're massive doughnut-shaped rings of cool plasma, trapped and dragged around by the stars' own magnetic fields.

In effect, nature built its own monitoring stations.

"Once we understood this, the blips in dimming stopped being weird little mysteries and became a space weather station," Bouma said while presenting the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

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The implications are significant. M dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the galaxy, and most host at least one rocky, Earth-sized planet, according to the Carnegie press release. Yet many of those worlds are hammered by flares and intense radiation, raising the question of whether they could ever support life.

These plasma structures, which the team estimates appear around at least 10 percent of young M dwarfs, now offer scientists a tool for measuring what those particle environments actually look like.

"We don't know yet if any planets orbiting M dwarfs are hospitable to life, but I feel confident that space weather is going to be an important part of answering that question," Bouma said.

Maybe the first alien worlds we understand aren’t the ones we see, but the ones whose storms we finally learn to read.

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