Double Star System Blasts Massive Outburst Towards Earth, Spotted by Astronomers

https://youtu.be/8YvFtZ8UTEI

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Published on Sep 20, 2018


For decades, astronomers have known about irregular outbursts from the double star system V745 Sco, which is located about 25,000 light years from Earth. Astronomers were caught by surprise when previous outbursts from this system were seen in 1937 and 1989. When the system erupted on February 6, 2014, however, scientists were ready to observe the event with a suite of telescopes including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. An extraordinary amount of energy was released during the explosion, equivalent to about 10 million trillion hydrogen bombs. V745 Sco is a binary star system that consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf locked together by gravity. These two stellar objects orbit so closely around one another that the outer layers of the red giant are pulled away by the intense gravitational force of the white dwarf. This material gradually falls onto the surface of the white dwarf. Over time, enough material may accumulate on the white dwarf to trigger a colossal thermonuclear explosion, causing a dramatic brightening of the binary called a nova. Astronomers observed V745 Sco with Chandra a little over two weeks after the 2014 outburst. Their key finding was it appeared that most of the material ejected by the explosion was moving towards our solar system. To explain this, a team of scientists from the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, the University of Palermo, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics constructed a three-dimensional (3D) computer model of the explosion, and adjusted the model until it explained the observations. In this model they included a large disk of cool gas around the equator of the binary caused by the white dwarf pulling on a wind of gas streaming away from the red giant. Chandra X-ray Observatory Read more here: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2017... A paper describing these results was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05692 Clips, images credit: Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & Siding Springs Observatory, Australia Music credit: YouTube Audio Library Blue Macaw - Quincas Moreira