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Eta Carinae The stellar system brighter and more mbadive at 10 thousand light-years, projects high-energy particles, some of which can reach the Earth in the form of rays cosmic .
This is suggested by a new study that used data from space telescope NuSTAR of the NASA ] "We know that the blast waves of exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles at speeds comparable to those of light, an incredible boost of energy, "said Kenji Hamaguchi, an astrophysicist at Goddard. Space flight center of the NASA . "Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments." Our badysis indicates that Eta Carinae is one of them. "
Eta Carinae located at about 7500 light-years In the southern constellation of Carina, it is famous for a nineteenth-century shine that briefly made it the second brightest star in the sky. also ejected a mbadive nebula in the form of an hourglbad, but the cause of the eruption remains little known.
The system contains a pair of mbadive stars whose eccentric orbits Approaching them every 5.5 years, the stars contain 90 and 30 times the mbad of our Sun and are close to 225 million kilometers.
"The two stars of Eta Carinae produce strong flows called stellar winds," said Michael Corcoran, also a member of Goddard. "When these winds collide during the orbital cycle, which produces a periodic signal in low-energy X-rays that we have followed for more than two decades."
Bridging the gap between surveillance Low-energy X-rays and observations from Fermi, Hamaguchi and their colleagues turned to NuSTAR who can focus much higher energy X-rays than any telescope above.
The researchers say that the best explanation for both the emission of X-rays and the emission of gamma rays is the acceleration of electrons in shock waves violent across the collision limit of the stellar winds. The X-rays detected by NuSTAR and gamma rays detected by Fermi come from the light of the stars, given a great energetic stimulation by the interactions with them. Electrons
Some of the ultra-fast electrons, as well as other accelerated particles, have to escape the system and maybe some of them drift to the Earth, where they can be detected as cosmic rays . we know that the region around Eta Carinae is the source of energy emission in X-rays and high energy gamma rays, "said Fiona Harrison, principal investigator of NuSTAR . "But until NuSTAR could identify the radiation, show that it came from the binary and study its properties in detail, the original was mysterious. "
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