In a discovery expected to upset conventional thinking about stellar physics, researchers have found plasma-trapping magnetic fields at work on a star 30 times bigger than our Sun. The finding implies that processes once thought to exist only on Sun-like stars may be common throughout the universe.

By stellar standards, our Sun is a middle-aged, mid-sized star of moderate activity. Still, incredibly strong magnetic fields trap plasma -- electrically charged clouds of particles -- and heat it to extremely high temperatures while also maintaining high densities.

Similar magnetic loops were not thought to exist on massive, energetic stars, known as O-type stars. For two decades, scientists assumed that high-energy X-ray emissions measured in O-type stars were the result of energetic shocks in the stellar winds -- steady streams of matter than billow out from all stars, including our Sun.

But new data from the star Zeta Orionis, provided by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, reveal a density for the hot, X-ray producing plasma that is much higher than the shock models can account for.

Researchers say the source must be a phenomenon similar to the magnetic loops found on the Sun.

"It really turns upside down what we've been thinking about these hot O-stars, because we thought that these massive stars did not have that sort of magnetic activity," said Andrea Dupree, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Dupree, who does similar research but was not involved in this study, marveled at the implications of the discovery, which was announced Wednesday.

"It makes you wonder what kind of a genie is residing in the core of these stars that can make it happen on such a large scale with so much more energy than what we see in our own Sun," Dupree told SPACE.com an hour after she first studied the results. "I'm still trying to accommodate it with what I've learned in the last 20 years."

O-type stars are typically 10 or more times larger than the Sun. They are known to have relatively short life spans, because they burn their nuclear fuel much faster than smaller stars. Zeta Orionis is classified as an O "supergiant," which is 30 times larger and 30 times more massive than the Sun.

O-type stars are believed to lack outer convection zones, which on the Sun transport most of the energy to the surface by fluid motions. Scientists considered convection zones necessary to create such hot and energetic plasmas confined in magnetic loops. Without these zones being located near the stellar surface, astronomers can't explain how such high-density knots of X-rays exist on Zeta Orionis.

Solar and stellar physicists agree they have some figuring to do.

"This is opening up a whole new domain of physics, of mathematics, of magnetic-field densities in these rapidly rotating stars that we've never seen before," Dupree said. "It is surprising."

Wayne Waldron, one of the researchers involved with the study, agreed: "This bucks conventional wisdom to find out that these stars really resemble our Sun."

Waldron said O-type stars only live millions of years, compared with billions for stars like our Sun. So while these massive stars may share a newly found physical characteristic with our favorite star, they are not likely to harbor planets that could support life.

"It is not clear that life as we know it could evolve in such a short time span," Waldron told SPACE.com. "Second, even if some form of life did start, it would have to learn to survive the tremendous ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. It would be very hard to imagine that life as we know it could survive such an environment."

Zeta Orionis, also called Alnitak, can be seen most of the year, and without a telescope. Viewing east to west, it is the first star in the belt of the constellation Orion the Hunter.

Zeta Orionis appears to be nestled in the Horsehead Nebula, a region of intense starbirth. Actually, Zeta Orionis is only 135 light-years from Earth, while the nebula is 1,600 light-years distant.