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Artist view of a massive and young binary star system. Image credit: NRAO / AUI / NSF
Latest research has revealed that astronomers have discovered the pair of binary stars the most massive and closest to the Earth.
The star known as PDS 27 and his companion are two gigantic plasma balls classified in the category of young massive stellar objects (MYSO). They have a combined mass estimated to be about 12 times that of the Sun and are locked at a distance of about 4.5 billion kilometers (2.8 billion kilometers) from each other, roughly the distance between the Sun and Neptune.
"With PDS 27 and his companion, we found the most massive and young stellar objects among the binaries solved so far," said Evgenia Koumpia, research fellow at the University of Leeds in England, and first author of an article revealing the results. , published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Identifying these types of stars is difficult because they are not very long. Unlike our Sun, which matures, massive stars live more dangerously. Because of their gigantic size, they must exhaust their vast reserves much more quickly and their lifespan is only a few million years compared to 10 billion of the Sun.
"It's a very exciting discovery. To observe and simulate massive binaries at the very beginning of their training is one of the main difficulties of modern astronomy, "Koumpia said.
"There is a shortage of young massive binary systems known in the mapped space.High-mass stars have a comparatively short life span, extinguishing and exploding as a supernovae in only a few million years." 39 years, making them difficult to spot, this limits our ability to test theories of how these stars are formed. "
Fortunately, the international team of researchers has found another pair of these types of binaries. The PDS 37 and its companion star are slightly smaller with a combined mass of 11 solar masses and are separated by an additional distance, about as far apart as the Pluto sun: 5.9 billion kilometers, or 3.7 billion miles.
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These two binary systems were discovered by analyzing data extracted from the very large telescope interferometer (VLTI) of the European Southern Observatory. An instrument called PIONIER, collects light from four telescopes to distinguish the stars associated in each system. The researchers hope that their discovery will help scientists understand how such massive stars are formed.
"The next big question – which we have tended to avoid up to now because of observation difficulties – is why so many of these massive stars are in binary systems?" Said Rene Oudmaijer, professor at Leeds United, and co-author of the study.
"It has become increasingly clear to astronomers that massive stars are almost never born alone, with at least one brother or sister for company. But the reasons why this is the case are still rather obscure.
"Massive stars exert a significant influence on their cosmic environment. Their stellar winds, their energy and the supernova explosions they generate can in turn affect the formation of other stars and galaxies. The evolution and fate of high-mass stars are quite complex, but previous studies have shown that they can be influenced to a large extent by their binary properties. "®
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