Stars do not immediately dim when dying but give off a mysterious light.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, LONDON — Scientists watch dying star emitting a mysterious light. light. Instead of disappearing into the darkness as is usually the case with energy-losing stars, this star gave off a mysterious glow.
This phenomenon was captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. The star is a binary star named TW Pictoris. The star system is located 1,400 light from Earth.
“This (mysterious flashing light) has never been seen in any other accretionary white dwarf. It was like turning on and off,” Simone Scaringi, an astronomer at the University of Durham Center for Extragalactic Astronomy in the UK, said in a statement. CNET, Wednesday (20/10).
Keep in mind, every star in the universe will one day disappear. Slowly but surely, their luster triggered by the hydrogen gas builds up as the energy supply runs out. MWhen you enter the final stage of a star’s life, it will become a white dwarf.
“Seeing the brightness of the TW pictoris dim in 30 minutes was incredible,” Scaringi said.
In solving this mystery, the team discovered that during the ‘dead’ or fading phase, the white dwarf’s accretion disk rotates so rapidly that it induces centrifugal forces strong enough to prevent the disk’s material from reaching the central star. That is why, this dying stellar object has nothing to swallow as energy thus limiting its light. This phenomenon is known as magnetic gating. To note, the disc is a structure formed by matter orbiting a star.
This phenomenon is similar to what happens when you go up roller coaster and enter the circle. A person riding it would not fall into the circle due to the force pressing on the passenger. After the off phase, the rotational speed of the disc returns to normal. Matter can escape the clutches of the spin to be eaten by the dwarf star.
“This is truly a previously unrecognized phenomenon. We can make comparisons with similar behavior in much smaller neutron stars, this could be an important step in helping us to better understand the process by which accretion objects lothers, eat up the material that surrounds them, and the magnetic field plays an important role in this process,” he said.
This research was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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