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By NASA // July 5, 2018
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New Study Suggests Eta Carinae Accelerates High Energy Particles
Above: New Study Using NASA's NuSTAR Space Telescope Data Suggests Eta Carinae, The Brightest Star System and massive in the 10,000 light-years, accelerates high-energy particles – some of which can reach the Earth as cosmic rays.
NASA – A new study using NASA's NuSTAR space telescope data suggests that Eta Carinae, the brightest, massive star system in the 10,000 light-years, accelerates particles to high energies – some of which can reach the Earth as cosmic rays. "We know that the shockwaves of 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 Greenbelt, Maryland. lead author of the study. "Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments." Our analysis indicates that Eta Carinae is one of them. "
Astronomers know that cosmic rays with higher energies to 1 billion electron volts (eV) come to us beyond our solar system. But because these particles – electrons, protons and atomic nuclei – all carry an electric 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. This event also ejected a massive hourglass nebula, but the cause of the eruption remains poorly understood.
The system contains a pair of massive stars whose eccentric orbits draw them abnormally every 5.5 years. The stars contain 90 and 30 times the mass of our Sun and spread to 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) at their closest approach – the average distance between Mars and the Sun.
"The two stars of Eta Carinae called the stellar winds," said a team member Michael Corcoran, also to Goddard. "Where 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. "
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NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope also observes a shift in gamma rays – light stores much more energy than X-rays – from a source in the direction of gamma rays. Eta Carinae. But Fermi's vision is not as sharp as that of X-ray telescopes, so astronomers have not been able to confirm the connection. (NASA image)
NASA's gamma-ray Fermi telescope is also seeing a shift in gamma rays – light stores much more energy than x-rays – from a source towards Eta Carinae. But Fermi's vision is not as clear as that of X-ray telescopes, so astronomers can not confirm the connection.
To bridge the gap between low-energy X-ray monitoring and Fermi's observations, Hamaguchi and his colleagues turn to NuSTAR. Launched in 2012, NuSTAR can focus X-rays much more energy than any previous telescope. The team reviewed NuSTAR's observations from March 2014 to June 2016, as well as lower-energy X-ray observations from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite over the same period.
Eta Carinae X-rays, or soft ones, originate from the gas at the interface of colliding stellar winds, where temperatures exceed 70 million degrees Fahrenheit (40 million degrees Celsius). But 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 between 2 and 3 eV
The analysis of the team, presented in an article published Monday, July 2 in Nature Astronomy, shows that These "hard" X-rays Researchers claim that the best explanation for both the emission of hard x-rays and gamma rays is that electrons are accelerated by violent shock waves along the binary orbital period. the collision of stellar winds. The X-rays detected by NuSTAR and the gamma rays Detected by Fermi come from the light of the stars which receives a huge boost of energy through interactions with these electrons
Some of the ultra-fast electrons, as well as some of the electrons. other accelerated particles, have to escape the system. some of them drift to the Earth, where they can be detected as cosmic rays.
NuSTAR detection shows that shock waves in the collision zone accelerate charged particles such as electrons and protons at the speed of light. Some of them can reach the Earth, where they will be detected as cosmic ray particles. X-rays scattered by debris ejected into the famous 1840 eruption of Eta Carinae can produce wider red emission. (NASA image)
"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, Senior NuSTAR Researcher and Professor of Astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, California. "But until NuSTAR is able to identify the radiation, show that it comes from the binary and study its properties in detail, the original was mysterious."
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's science mission. Direction to Washington. NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Virginia.
The operations center of NuSTAR's mission is at UC Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA's High Energy Science Astrophysics Research Archive Center. ASI provides the ground station of the mission and a mirror archive. Caltech manages the JPL for NASA
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