The true nature of a star that has baffled astronomers for more than 100 years has finally been revealed.
HD 45166 is a dying Wolf-Rayet star about 3,000 light-years away. Like most stars in its class, it is helium-rich and has a companion. However, the object behaves in a special way that we have not seen in other Wolf-Rayet stars. The mass loss is greater than expected, and the winds have an unusual pattern, writes a Science Alert.
Now astronomer Tomer Shenar of the University of Amsterdam and his team have discovered that this strange celestial body has an incredibly strong magnetic field, which suggests that when it reaches the end of its ‘life’, it transforms into a so-called magnetar.
The detection makes HD 45166 the first known magnetic Wolf-Rayet star and resolves previous problems with the binary, as well as filling some of the gaps in our understanding of how massive stars transform into the most magnetic objects in the universe.
Wolf-Rayet stars are rare, but they can be among the most spectacular in the Milky Way, as they use up every drop of fusion fuel in their cores. They are very hot, very bright, and contain very little hydrogen, but are rich in carbon and nitrogen.
Due to the solar winds, they also lose their mass quickly and become supernova in a relatively short time. Shooting their outer material into space, their core quickly collapses into a neutron star. An ultra-dense object with a diameter of only 20 kilometers, weighing 2.4 times the mass of the Sun.
Magnetars are a type of neutron star, but with an incredible magnetic field about a thousand times stronger than a normal neutron star and four billion times stronger than Earth’s.
We don’t yet know how they will turn out like this. One possible way, according to the models, is if the star already had a magnetic field before the supernova and core collapse. The problem with this is that so far no star has been detected that had a strong enough magnetic field at the end of its life.
The research was carried out by Science was published in the journal
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2023-08-18 18:14:27
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