Scientists discover new 'pinwheel' star system
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This is an image of Apep captured at 8 microns
in the thermal infrared with the VISIR camera on the European Southern
Observatory's VLT telescope, Mt Paranal, Chile. Credit: University of
Sydney/European Southern Observatory ESO
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An international team of scientists has discovered a new, massive star system--one that also challenges existing theories of how large stars eventually die.
"This system is likely the first of its kind ever discovered in our own galaxy," says Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan fellow at New York University's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and one of the researchers.
Specifically, the scientists detected a gamma-ray burst progenitor system--a type of supernova that blasts out an extremely powerful and narrow jet of plasma and which is thought to occur only in distant galaxies.
"It was not expected such a system would be found in our galaxy--only in younger galaxies much further away," adds Pope. "Given its brightness, it is surprising it was not discovered a lot sooner."
The discovery of the system, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy and dubbed "Apep," also included scientists from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, the University of Sydney, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Sheffield, and the University of New South Wales.
The system, an estimated 8,000 light years away Earth, is adorned with a dust "pinwheel"-- whose strangely slow motion suggests current theories on star deaths may be incomplete.
When the most massive stars in our universe near the end of their lives, they produce fast winds--typically moving at more than 1,000 kilometers per second--that carry away large amounts of a star's mass. These fast winds should carry away the star's rotational energy and slow it down long before it dies.
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This animated gif is
intended to illustrate the geometry of the structure that we have witnessed in
the Apep system. From a single image, it is harder to understand the 3-D
structure. The central binary (only: not the wider Northern companion in the
triple) is illustrated as the blue star at the centre. The geometry given is
that believed typical for a Wolf-Rayet colliding pinwheel system: that is an
optically thin dust plume distributed over the surface of a cone that is
dictated by the colliding winds. The whole outflow structure is wrapped into a
spiral by the orbital motion of the presumed central binary. Further the dust
formation has a specific onset and cessation, which truncate the spiral at the
outer and inner limits (for example, giving rise to the notable elliptical
hole). Note this is a toy animation to illustrate a fly-around of the
structure, and not a model fitted to the data that describes the dust flow
process. The looping animation proceeds for about half an orbit (say roughly 60
years) with a pause at about the present epoch. Note that the motion we
actually recorded with VISIR in the real data only spans 3 years. Image Credit:
University of Sydney
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"These massive stars are often found with a partner, in which the fast winds from the dying star can collide with its companion to produce a shock that emits at X-ray and radio frequencies and produces exotic dust patterns," explains Joseph Callingham, a postdoctoral fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and lead author of the paper.
"Apep's dust pinwheel moves much slower than the wind in the system," he adds. "One way this can occur is if one of the massive stars is rotating so quickly that it is nearly tearing itself apart. Such a rotation means that when it runs out of fuel and begins to explode as a supernova, it will collapse at the poles before the equator, producing a gamma-ray burst."
The work was performed, in part, under contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, funded by NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program, which is executed by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute.
For more on the discovery of Apep and how the scientists came to understanding of the system outlined in the paper, please visit Nature's "Behind the Paper" blog post (live after the embargo lifts): https://astronomycommunity.nature.com/
Images of Apep, as well as a video rendering of system, may be downloaded
Source: New York University,
