A team of astronomers has spotted a giant ‘tidal wave’ crashing into one of two stars in a binary system. According to the research team, this is the first time such a phenomenon has been observed. Tidal waves are said to have enough energy to shatter the earth.
The phenomenon occurs in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, where our solar system is located. The star system MACHO 80.7443.1718 is about 169,000 light years from Earth.
heartbeat star
The star of the binary system is 35 times the mass of the Sun, and the companion star is much smaller. The two orbit each other in very close elliptical orbits. Such stars are called “heartbeat stars”. This is because the brightness changes periodically, like the rhythm of a heartbeat.
The research team was published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy on the 10th.published papershowed that each time the orbiting primary and companion stars pass each other at their closest approach, their mutual gravitational forces cause tidal effects that act between the Earth and the Moon. This tidal action generates huge waves, and it seems that a part of the large star, which is the main star, is deformed so that it protrudes greatly.
This is a phenomenon commonly seen in ‘heartbeat stars’, but in this case the brightness fluctuations are striking, about 200 times larger than expected. When the companion star comes close to the main star, tidal waves are generated in the main star, causing it to swell and smash violently against the surface of the main star.
Morgan McLeod, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral fellow in Theoretical Astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said, “Each time the host star’s high tidal wave crashes, it destroys the entire Earth hundreds of times. It releases as much energy as possible.”explain. “No other heartbeat star is known to fluctuate so wildly.”
breaking waves
Lucky to see this phenomenon, which occurs every about 30 days, at the time of its occurrence, McLeod decided to build a computer model to figure out exactly what was happening. They found that the tidal waves generated by the gravitational interaction of the two stars reach a height of about one-fifth of the star’s radius (about 4.3 million km). What’s more, it turns out that as the waves break, material is thrown outward, much like what happens in Earth’s oceans.
This is the first time such an extreme phenomenon has been observed, but it won’t be the last. “Plans are already underway to search for more extreme heartbeat stars, looking for glowing stellar atmospheres that are slammed by crashing waves,” McLeod said. About 1,000 known heartbeat stars, about 20 of which fluctuate wildly in brightness.
