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Eta Carinae, the brightest and most mbadive star system at 10,000 light-years, accelerates particles at speeds comparable to those of light – some of which can reach the Earth as cosmic rays, suggests a new study . "The shock waves of exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles at speeds comparable to those of light," says lead author of the Kenji Hamaguchi study, astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland.
"Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our badysis indicates Eta Carinae is one of them," Hamaguchi said.
Astronomers know that cosmic rays with energies exceeding one billion electronvolts (eV) to us beyond our solar system.
But because these particles – electrons, protons and atomic nuclei – all have an electrical charge, they deflect when they encounter magnetic fields. For this study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers used data from NASA's NuSTAR space telescope.
Launched in 2012, NuSTAR can focus X-rays of a much greater energy. than any previous telescope.
Using both new data and archived data, the team examined NuSTAR's observations from March 2014 to June 2016, as well as lower-energy X-ray observations from the XMM-Newton satellite. of the European Space Agency over the same period. "We have known for some time that the region around Eta Carinae is the source of energy emission in X-rays and high energy gamma rays," said Fiona Harrison, the principal investigator of NuSTAR.
until NuSTAR could identify the radiation, show that it comes from the binary and study its properties in detail, the original was mysterious, "said Harrison, who is also a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.
Eta Carinae, located about 7500 light-years from the southern constellation of Carina, is famous for its 19th-century eruptions that make it the second brightest star in the sky
This event also ejects a mbadive hourglbad Nebula shaped, but the cause of the rash 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 rise to 225 million km at their closest approach – the mean distance between Mars and the Sun.
– IANS
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(This story was not edited by Business Standard staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
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