The cosmic rays of the massive star system can reach Earth: NASA

WASHINGTON: 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 as cosmic rays, according to a study using a telescope The NASA.

"We know that the exploding 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 the Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA.

"Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our badysis indicates that Eta Carinae is one of them," said Hamaguchi, lead author of the study. published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers know that cosmic rays with energies greater than a 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 when they encounter magnetic fields. This blurs their paths and hides their origins.

Eta Carinae, located about 7500 light-years from the southern constellation of Carina, is famous for its 19th-century eruptions that make it briefly the second brightest star in the sky.

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 spend 225 million kilometers at their closest approach – about the average distance between Mars and the Sun.

"The two stars of Eta Carinae cause 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, we have been following for more than two decades," said Corcoran.

NASA's gamma-ray Fermi telescope also observes a shift in gamma rays – light stores much more energy than x-rays – from a source towards the gamma rays. 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 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, three times more than can be explained by shockwaves 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.