Home » Technology » Groundbreaking Close-Up Images Reveal Dying Star WOH G64 Preparing for Supernova in Neighboring Magellanic Cloud

Groundbreaking Close-Up Images Reveal Dying Star WOH G64 Preparing for Supernova in Neighboring Magellanic Cloud

WASHINGTON – Scientists have taken close-up pictures of a star that appears to be dying. It is surrounded by gas and dust as it heads towards its destruction in a massive explosion known as a supernova. This was the first time that this important event had ever been photographed.

According to the researchers, what makes this even more amazing is that the star seen is not in our Milky Way galaxy, but in a neighboring galaxy called the Magellanic Cloud.

This is the first high-resolution image of a mature star in another galaxy, although newborn stars in the Magellanic Cloud were visible in research published last year. Zooming in means that the image captures the star and its surroundings.

The dying star, named WOH G64, is located about 160,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance that light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The rather blurry image was obtained using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at the European Southern Observatory based in Chile.

The image shows the star surrounded by an egg-shaped cocoon of gas and dust – called a nebula – which the star appears to be expelling. A thin oval ring on the back of the cocoon, possibly made of more dust, was also visible.

“The star is in the final stages of its life before stellar death,” said astronomer Keiichi Ohnaka of Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“The reason we see these shapes is because the star ejects more material in some directions than in others. On the other hand, the structure would ‘look around,’ said Ohnaka.

Another possible explanation for these shapes is the gravitational influence of a yet-to-be-discovered companion star, Ohnaka said.

Before it began ejecting material, WOH G64 was estimated to be about 25 to 40 times the size of the Sun, according to astronomer and study co-author Jacco van Loon of Keele University in England . It is a type of giant star known as a red supergiant.

“The estimated mass means that it has lived for about 10 to 20 million years, and that it will die soon,” van Loon said.

This is the first image of a star “at this long stage that may undergo an unprecedented metamorphosis before exploding,” van Loon said.

“For the first time we can see the structure surrounding a star in its dying stages,” van Loon said. “Even in our Milky Way galaxy, we don’t have such a picture.

Massive stars have shorter lives than less massive stars. For example, the sun is more than 4.5 billion years old and still has billions of years left. The diameter of WOH G64 is very large as it expands before the expected outburst.

If it were placed in the center of our solar system, it would extend into the orbit of Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun.

“We found that WOH G64 has changed its appearance significantly in the past 10 years,” Ohnaka said, adding that the star has become fainter, possibly because the star’s light has surrounded by the gas and dust it emits.

“This gives us a rare opportunity to see the life of a star directly, especially the last stages of a high-mass star before it died in a supernova explosion,” Ohnaka said.

The Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, as is another nearby galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud. Both are smaller than our galaxy and offer different galactic settings.

The Magellanic Cloud, for example, has less dust than the Milky Way and a smaller content of what astronomers call metallic elements—in addition to hydrogen and helium. These properties, said van Loon, “can make the difference between how stars live and die. “

“Such conditions were more common in the early universe and were probably similar to the Milky Way when it was young,” van Loon said.


2024-11-27 22:05:00
#Scientists #time #pictures #stars #verge #collapse

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