“As a bonus, we also saw the white dwarf moving behind a region with a strong magnetic field, most likely a ‘stellar prominence,’ which is a large loop of plasma erupting from a star’s surface,” team member Natasha Hurley-Walker of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Curtin University, Australia, said. “It’s amazing that by using radio wavelengths we can detect the storms on a star over 5,000 light-years away.”

Hurley-Walker and the team at ICRAR have been at the cutting edge of rare star systems like this.