Using the Hubble space telescope (NASA / ESA), the international team of astronomers recently captured the first optical images of a stellar explosion, and discovered a bubble Quick peanut-shaped balls bulge out in space.
Members of the research group Valerio Ribeiro - John Moores University graduate student Liverpool presented their results on April 22 at the European Astrophysics and Astronomy Week conference held at the University. Hertfordshire.
The researchers observed a star in the constellation Ophiuchus (also known as RS Oph). In this constellation, there have been many explosions within a century. On February 12, 2006, Japanese amateur astronomers said it glowed once and could be observed with the naked eye. This is the first explosion of RS Oph since 1985, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study this constellation thanks to modern telescopes on the earth and in space, in space. there's a Hubble telescope.
RS Oph contains a white dwarf, which is dead and about the size of the Earth orbiting a larger star called a red giant star. Due to its distance from the red star, the white dwarf draws hydrogen-rich gas from the outer layer of the red star, and every 20 years the amount of gas accumulated on the surface of the white dwarf causes an intense fusion explosion. strong. The phenomenon of white dwarfs increases to the maximum brightness that occurs less than a day, at the peak of energy that RS Oph emits 100,000 times the Sun. The explosion also emitted a large amount of Earth's mass at a speed of several thousand kilometers per second.
The giant red star also continuously lost huge amounts of gas due to the wind surrounding the system. As a result, the explosion on the white dwarf occurred inside its companion's atmosphere, the gas emanating from the explosion slammed into the red star at great speed. Thanks to the Hubble telescope, observations of RS Oph were conducted after the explosion of about 155 to 449 days. Combining spectroscopic images from ground-based telescopes, the first images reveal a two-lobed peanut-like structure, material flowing outwards at speeds of 1000 to 3000 km / s.
The group also determined that the giant red wind is shaped by the nebula. In a binary system like this, matter is concentrated in the orbital plane of stars while at the two poles is less dense. When the explosion occurs, the material ejected will crash into the dense gas zone at the orbital plane and then decelerate rapidly while at the two poles still moving fast. The result is the peanut shape as observed in the image, which confirms the authenticity of previous observations using ground-based radio telescopes.
Currently Valerio Ribeiro hopes to observe RS Oph in the coming years. He commented: 'Some astronomers believe that binary systems like this will explode like supernovae. Our next study will help us know if that really happens. '