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Eta Carinae has been a source of mystery and fascination for nearly two centuries. This system of binary stars is located about 7500 light-years away, in the constellation of Carina, and is composed of two huge stars with 90 and 30 times the mbad of our sun.
Like the Inquisitr previously reported, Eta Carinae briefly became the second brightest star in the night sky in the 1840s, after a mbadive eruption that also created a cloud of gas in hourglbad shape around the double star system, known as the Hubble. Space Telescope)
A new study on the properties of Eta Carinae revealed that this "superstar", as NASA calls it, is even more intriguing than we thought and that ### It projects cosmic rays, some of which could even reach our planet.
These cosmic rays are "one of our rare direct samples of matter coming from outside the solar system," says NASA, and contain more than a billion electron -volts (eV) of energy. However, we can not know for sure where they are coming from exactly.
Because they are electrically charged and that they change course under the influence of magnetic fields, the cosmic rays that reach the Earth are difficult to trace.
Still, this new study, conducted by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and published July 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy proves that Eta Carinae is the only one in the world. In the video below, NASA details how data from its NuSTAR space telescope discovered that Eta Carinae, "the brightest and most mbadive star system of 10,000 lumi- years," produces cosmic rays by accelerating particles at incredibly high speeds. "
" It's more than a superstar. It's a cosmic ray rifle. "
Here's how it all goes.
The mbadive stars of Eta Carinae are in orbit once every 5.5 years, when they are getting closer" one of the few. 39, another ", at a distance of about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) – or about the same distance between Mars and the sun.
When that happens, their stellar winds – the material releases from Eta Carinae's two hot stars – collide, producing shock waves that accelerate particles near the speed of light.
Some of these extremely fast particles crush in the light of the stars, which increases the energy of their light, transforming them into X-rays and even gamma.] The focused observations of NuSTAR show that the collision winds of the Carinae mbadive binary eta accelerate the particles at very high energies, adding to the flux of cos rays of the Galaxy Hamaguchi et al .: https://t.co/1Ve7Sb56Ay pic.twitter.com/doL5zOWH48
– Astronomy of Nature (@NatureAstronomy) July 2, 2018
"Both The stars of Eta Carinae result in powerful flows called stellar winds. Where these winds collide during the orbital cycle, which produces a periodic signal in low-energy X-rays, "says Michael Corcoran, an astrophysicist from Goddard
. According to Corcoran, NASA is monitoring energy x-rays, or "soft" x-rays, from this binary star system for more than 20 years. These X-rays have been observed with both the Fermi and NuSTAR gamma-ray space telescope
The great advantage of NuSTAR is that it can target high-energy X-rays as well as hard X-rays. ". which is exactly what he did in the case of Eta Carinae. Over a two-year period, from March 2014 to June 2016, the space telescope scanned the binary star system and detected x-rays greater than 30,000 eV – an energy three times greater than what it was. normal collisions of stellar winds can be expected. 19659003] At the same time, Fermi also identified changes in gamma ray emissions from Eta Carinae. All of this indicates superficial particles that evolve into cosmic rays after being accelerated by the interaction between stellar winds and colliding with starlight.
The lead author of the study, Kenji Hamaguchi, also of Goddard, came back on this revelation. blast waves from exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles at speeds comparable to those of light, an incredible boost of energy. Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our badysis indicates that Eta Carinae is one of them. "
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