Astronomers observing a distant star have spotted a huge coronal mass ejection that is 10 times bigger than the most powerful one ever recorded according to a report from Daily Mail.

It has sparked fears that a mammoth superflare could also erupt from our own sun, with the ensuing mass ejection potentially wreaking havoc on GPS signals and shutting down power grids. Such a flare is theoretically possible, experts say, but only likely to happen every several thousand years.

What a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder wanted to find out is if it could lead to an equally enormous coronal mass injection, which happens right after starlets loose a flare or a sudden and bright burst of radiation deep into space.

CNET stated: “Planetary atmospheres, or habitable environments, are being established around young stars,” said Kosuke Namekata, a sun scientist at Kyoto University in Japan and first author on the paper. “Our research can contribute to the understanding of the environment in which life is born.”

The discovery, published on Dec. 9 in the journal Nature Astronomy, was made by Namekata and colleagues using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, which observes distant stars in search of planets.

But the team wasn’t hunting other worlds, it was looking for solar flares. Stars, like our sun, are vibrant and violent places that can spew out sudden explosions of radiation known as coronal mass ejections after a flaring event. These outbursts cause radiation to spill out to space, and they can even reach the Earth, where they interfere with satellites in orbit.

While viewing EK Draconis on April 5, 2020, the team spotted a superflare event. This isn’t unusual for a star, but as they continued to observe the outburst, they spotted what could be a coronal mass ejection. And it was an extremely powerful one. “What we observed was an eruption that was more than 10 times more massive than the largest CME ever observed on the sun,” said Namekata.