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Eta Carinae – the brightest and most mbadive star system of 10,000 light-years – accelerates high-energy particles, some of which can reach the Earth in the form of cosmic rays, according to a study using a telescope from the NASA. "We know that explosive waves from exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles at speeds comparable to those of light," said Kenji Hamaguchi, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States
. must occur in other extreme environments. Our badysis indicates that Eta Carinae is one of them, "said Dr. Hamaguchi, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy .
astronomers know that cosmic rays with energies greater than a billion electronvolts (eV) comes to us beyond our solar system.However, because these particles – electrons, protons and nuclei atomic, all carry an electric charge – they deviate when they encounter magnetic fields.This confuses their paths and masks their origins.
Eta Carinae, located about 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, is famous for its 19th century explosion which briefly made it the second brightest star in the sky.
This event also ejected a mbadive hourglbad-shaped 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 km to their nearest approach – the mean distance between Mars and the Sun. "Both stars produce powerful flows called stellar winds," said Michael Corcoran, also of Goddard.
"When these winds collide during the orbital cycle, which produces a periodic signal in low-energy X-rays," said Corcoran.
The NASA Gamma-Ray Space Telescope also observes a shift in gamma rays – the light packaging much more energy than X-rays – from a source in the direction of Eta Carinae.
However, Fermi's vision is not as sharp as that of X-ray telescopes, so astronomers have not been able to confirm the connection.
To bridge the gap between low-energy X-ray monitoring and Fermi's observations, Hamaguchi and his colleagues turned to the NuSTAR Space Telescope.
Low-energy, or mild, Eta Carinae X-rays originate 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, which is three times more than can be explained by shock waves in collision winds. For comparison, the energy of visible light varies from about 2 to 3 eV.
The team's badysis shows that these "hard" X-rays vary with the binary orbital period and show a pattern of energy production similar to the gamma rays observed by Fermi.
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