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Scientists have found new evidence in mysterious fluorescent blue ring debris Nebula that may explain how this strange structure was formed.
The Blue Ring Nebula is home to a central star, called TYC 2597-735-1. An unusual ultraviolet ring surrounds the star, which astronomers first observed in 2004 with the help of now-defunct NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) space telescope. So far, the formation of this particular ring – which is in fact invisible ultraviolet light which was coded blue in the telescope images – has largely remained a mystery.
“Every time we thought we had figured this out, something would say, ‘No, that’s not right’” ”Mark Seibert, astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, member of the GALEX team and co-author on new research, said in a press release. “It’s a scary thing as a scientist. But I also love how unique this object is and the effort that so many people take to figure it out.
Related: Gallery: Strange shapes of nebulae, what do you see?
Using the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, researchers found that the blue ring is actually the base of a cone-shaped cloud of brilliant molecular hydrogen that stretches away from the central star, toward Earth. The new observations also show a second cone-shaped cloud extending from the star in the opposite direction.
The bases of the cone-shaped clouds appear to overlap when viewed from Earth, creating the ring shape around the star, said Christopher Martin, a physicist at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and former principal researcher of GALEX, during a press conference. held digitally on Tuesday (Nov. 17), before the research was made public.
Scientists behind the new research believe clouds of fluorescent debris formed after a solar star collided and consumed a smaller stellar companion just a few thousand years ago. Recent observations capture an unprecedented evolutionary phase of a stellar collision.
“Merging two stars is quite common, but they quickly become obscured by a lot of dust as the ejecta expand and cool in space, which means we can’t see what really happened. “Keri Hoadley, lead author of the study and a physicist at Caltech, said in the statement.
The timing of the new sightings was critical in helping scientists understand the phenomenon. “It’s like seeing a baby when it first walks,” Don Neill, astrophysicist at Caltech and member of the GALEX team, said in the statement. “If you blink, you might miss it.”
It was that moment that allowed researchers to really see what was going on. “We believe this object represents a late stage in these transient events, when the dust finally clears and we have good eyesight,” Hoadley said. “But we also captured the process before it was too late. the nebula will dissolve into the interstellar medium, and we couldn’t say anything at all. “
The stellar collision ejected a cloud of hot debris into space. When the debris flew outward, it created a shock wave which, in turn, heated the hydrogen molecules in the debris cloud, producing the ultraviolet emissions that scientists first observed. in 2004.
The researchers also used archived data from NASA Spitzer Space Telescope and the Wide-field survey explorer (WISE), which revealed excess infrared emissions around the central star of the Blue Ring Nebula. These observations suggest that the star is surrounded by a disk of dust that absorbs the star’s light and then re-emits in the infrared. The researchers believe that this disk cut the cloud of debris surrounding the star in half, creating the two cone-shaped clouds that stretch in opposite directions.
The results were published today (November 18) in the Nature journal.
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