[The Epoch Times, Dàmhair 18, 2024](Epoch Times reporter Chen Juncun reported) NASA’s Hubble space telescope photographed the unique binary star system R Aquarii . The system suffered a violent eruption, spewing huge filaments of light gas, like an interstellar volcanic eruption, adding to the magnificent surrounding nebulae.
NASA pointed out in a press release issued on October 16 that R Aquarius is only about 700 light-years away from Earth a binary star symbiotic to Earth.
R Aquarii undergoes a violent eruption, spewing huge filaments of glowing gas that make the area look like lawn sprinklers wildly spraying water. This very much shows how the universe redistributes the products of nuclear energy created inside stars and thrown back into space.
The main star R Aquarii is an aging red giant, and the companion star is a close white dwarf. This red giant star is known as Variable Mira and is more than 400 times larger than the sun.
The great red giant pulses and changes temperature over a vibrational cycle of about 390 days, while its brightness changes up to 750 times. At its peak, the star was nearly 5,000 times brighter than the Sun, a dazzling luminosity.
As the white dwarf travels on its 44-year orbit and the closer it gets to the red giant, it pulls away a lot of hydrogen. This material accumulates in the accretion disk around the white dwarf until it undergoes powerful explosions and emissions, especially when the white dwarf approaches the red giant.
Such an explosion releases powerful jets that look like filaments shooting out of the binary system, creating rings and contrails. Twisted by the force of the explosion and driven up and out by strong magnetic fields, the plasma, also known as plasma, appears to be in the form of a stream of electrons, bending into a spiral.
These filaments glow in visible light because they are powered by the intense radiation from R Aquarii. The nebula surrounding the binary system is called Cederblad 211, and may be the remnants of an ancient nova (a star that exploded in brightness due to an explosion).
The size of this eruption is amazing even from an astronomical point of view, as the ejected material can be traced to at least 400 billion kilometers (or 2,500 times the distance between the sun and the Earth) from the center of the binary system.
The Hubble Space Telescope team first observed R Aquarii in 1990. They made the following time-lapse video based on observations from 2014 to 2023 to show the dynamic behavior of the binary star system. We see the rapid and amazing evolution of the two stars and the surrounding nebula. This binary star system shrinks and brightens due to the intense collision of the red giant star.
Most of these nebulae are green, with bluer parts visible from time to time as they are illuminated when lighthouse-like beams of light from rotating binaries sweep over them.
Images like these and more from the Hubble Space Telescope will change how people think about special interstellar “volcanoes” like R Aquarii.
The Hubble Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been observing for more than 30 years and continues to make great discoveries.
Editor-in-Chief: Ye Ziwei #
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