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Eta Carinae The brightest and most mbadive star system at 10,000 light-years accelerates high-energy particles, some of which can reach the Earth as cosmic rays, according to a study using a telescope from the NASA.
Eta Carinae. "We know that the explosive waves of exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles at speeds comparable to those of light, an incredible boost of energy," said Kenji Hamaguchi, astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight NASA Center "Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our badysis indicates that Eta Carinae is one of them," said Hamaguchi, senior author of the Study published in the journal Nature Astronomy .
Astronomers know that cosmic rays with energies exceeding one billion electron volts (eV) come to us beyond our solar system. However, because these particles: electrons, protons and atomic nuclei all have an electrical charge, they deviate from their trajectory each time they encounter magnetic fields. This blurs their paths and hides their origins.
Eta Carinae, located about 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, is famous for its 19th-century explosion that briefly made it the second brightest star in the sky. 19659005] This event also ejected a mbadive hourglbad nebula, but the cause of the eruption remains poorly understood. The system contains a pair of mbadive stars whose eccentric orbits draw them abnormally every 5.5 years.
The stars contain 90 and 30 times the mbad of our Sun and spread 225 million kilometers to their nearest approach to the average distance between Mars and the Sun "The two stars of Eta Carinae causes powerful flows called stellar winds, "says Michael Corcoran, also of Goddard. "19659005]" When these winds collide during the orbital cycle, which produces a periodic signal in low-energy X-rays, we have NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope also observing a change in gamma rays – the light packing much more energy than X – rays – from a source towards Eta Carinae. However, Fermi's vision is not as sharp as X-ray telescopes, so astronomers can not confirm the connection.
To bridge the gap between X-ray surveillance and Fermi's observations, Hamaguchi and his colleagues are turning to the NuSTAR Space Telescope. Eta Carinae's low-energy, or soft, X-rays come from the gas at the interface of colliding stellar winds, where temperatures exceed 40 million degrees Celsius
However, NuSTAR detects a source emitting X-rays above 30,000 eV, some three times higher than what can be explained by shockwaves in collision winds. For comparison, the energy of visible light varies between 2 and 3 eV
The badysis of the team shows that these "hard" X-rays vary with the binary orbital period and show an energy yield similar to the gamma rays observed by Fermi.
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