Oct. 16 () –
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has provided a spectacular and colorful image in close-up of one of the busiest stars in our galaxywhich weaves a huge spiral pattern between the stars. Hubble images capture its details and its evolution is shown in a unique time-lapse video, as reported by the European Space Agency.
R Aquarii, located just 700 light years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, is a symbiotic binary star: a type of binary star system formed by a white dwarf and a red giant surrounded by a large dynamic nebula. As the closest symbiotic star to Earth, R Aquarii was studied by none other than Edwin Hubble in an effort to understand the mechanism powering the system.
R Aquarii undergoes violent eruptions that expel enormous filaments of incandescent gas. This spectacularly demonstrates how the Universe redistributes the products of nuclear energy that form deep within stars and are ejected into space.
It belongs to a class of double stars called symbiotic stars. The primary star is an aging red giant and its companion is a burnt-out compact star known as a white dwarf.
The primary red giant star is classified as a variable star that is more than 400 times larger than our Sun. The swollen monster star pulses, changes temperature and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a period of about 390 days.
In its heyday, The star is blinding with almost 5,000 times the brightness of our Sun. As the white dwarf moves closer to the red giant over its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally absorbs hydrogen gas.
This material accumulates in the accretion disk surrounding the white dwarf, until it undergoes a powerful outburst and jet ejection, especially during the white dwarf’s closest approach to the red giant donor star.
These phenomena are of more than a passing interest to astronomers and laymen, as they are a known way (in addition to supernova phenomena, truly titanic but extremely rare) of releasing chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and carbon. helium to the interstellar medium.
Heavier elements, such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, are fundamental components of planets like Earth and life forms like ours. They form deep inside stars, where the temperature is high enough to fuse hydrogen and helium.
This explosion ejects powerful jets that look like filaments shooting out of the binary system, forming loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers. The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upward and outward by strong magnetic fields.
The exit jet appears to fold back on itself in a spiral pattern. The filaments glow in visible light because they are energized by the scorching radiation of the stellar duo that is R Aquarii. The nebula around the binary star is known as Cederblad 211, and may be the remnant of a past nova.
The scale of the event is extraordinary even in astronomical terms, as the emitting material can be traced back to at least 400 billion kilometers (or 2,500 times the distance between the Sun and Earth) from the central core.
The ESA/Hubble team has developed a unique image sequence of the object consisting of several observing programs spanning 2014 to 2023.
In the five images, you can see the rapid and spectacular evolution of the binary star and its surrounding nebula. The binary star dims and brightens, as seen by the size of the red diffraction peaks surrounding it, due to the strong pulsations of the red giant star.
The nebula appears in mainly green colors, but bluer parts of it appear and disappear: this is because they are being illuminated as the beam of light from the rotating binary star sweeps over them in a lighthouse shape.
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