SPACE – The Romanian space telescope to be launched by the American Space Agency (NASA) has exciting plans. The Roman telescope will follow in the steps of the first stars in the universe, or at least, they will find the remains of them destroyed by black holes.
These early stars are called Population III (Pop III) stars. This star has very different characteristics from the sun and other stars that we see in the night sky.
Because, at that time, the universe was not yet filled with what astronomers call “metals”, ie elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
Pop III stars appeared just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang and have a very low “metal” content. The early stars were composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.
It is believed that this star is much bigger and hotter than the sun. As a result, these stars burn their fuel for nuclear fusion quickly, making them difficult targets for astronomers to detect.
Because these early stars were responsible for the formation of metals that became the building blocks for the younger generations of stars, studying them has become the key to understanding the evolution of the cosmos. Recent research suggests that the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (Roman for short), scheduled for launch in 2027, may have a unique way of doing this.
Instead of looking for whole Pop III stars, Roman looks for what’s left of them after they got stuck too close to a black hole and were destroyed in what astronomers say is a full blown separation event -sea, or TDE.
“Since we know that there were likely black holes at those early times, if they capture how they interact in those early stars it might give us the best chance of Pop stars III to find indirectly,” said a member of the research team, a scientist from Yale University, Priyamvada. Natarajan.
Roman oversees the destruction of the first stars
When a star passes close to a black hole, its massive impact produces tidal forces within it. This causes the star to be caught horizontally while being pulled vertically. The material that is the star is turned into “noodles” of stellar material, in a process called “spaghettification.”
However, the material that was once a doomed star cannot fall directly into a black hole. Instead, the material accumulates in a flat cloud around the black hole called an accretion disk. As this material spins and heads toward the black hole, it heats up, emitting light that can be seen in some cases from billions of light years away.
EFT itself is a temporary event. When a star is destroyed, there is a brief but intense burst of X-ray, radio, ultraviolet and optical light. However, these violent events look very different when viewed across vast distances of about 13 billion light years or more.
As the light from these events travels, the expansion of space causes its wavelength to expand, pushing it into the infrared portion of the spectrum – a phenomenon known as “redshift”.
In addition, the temporal properties of TDEs change as their light travels through the cosmos. This is because repulsion causes the TDE that destroys Pop III to clear over hundreds to thousands of days and then fade over a period of decades.
2024-05-11 06:22:07
#NASAs #Roman #telescope #discovers #star #destroyed #universe
