[ad_1]
Astronomers have discovered a bright young star running away from home. Why? What did the star's parents do to deserve this? According to a study published August 6 in the newspaper Astronomy and astrophysicsit's no one's fault it seems that the young star has simply fallen into the bad crowd, namely a very hungry black hole.
The star, named PG 1610 + 062, was observed for the first time across the sky during a star survey in 1986, although little attention was given to the history of the stellar renegade since then. In this study, astronomers working at the W.M. Keck observatory atop Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii took a critical look at the breakaway. They confirmed that it is one of the fastest stars never seen shooting on the galactic disk of the Milky Way.
The team calculated that the speed of the star was about 2 million km / h (1.2 million mph), which is not enough to escape the gravity of the galaxy, but fast enough to be able to leave the solar system of the star. in the cosmic dust.
Related, connected, related: 11 fascinating facts about our galaxy of the Milky Way
Different processes explain how a star can be booted out of its original system, and they usually involve binary partnerships That is, two stars orbiting a common center of mass. If a member of the couple were to theoretically disappear – for example, by exploding into a supernova or being engulfed by a supermassive black hole – the remaining star could receive a kick so abrupt and energetic in the pants that it was. she would run straight into her lancet. house system, or even out of his galaxy fully.
The case of PG 1610 + 062 is perhaps a little unusual, the researchers wrote. Judging by the mass, speed and probable origin of the star (the team traced it up to the Sagittarius's spiral arm of the galaxy), it seems unlikely that the star approached sufficiently supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy to see his partner partner engulfed.
The fast but not too fast movement of the star seems rather to suggest that he had a collision with black hole of mid-mass – that is, a black hole with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun (as opposed to a stellar black hole, which can have up to about 20 suns of mass, or a a supermassive black hole, which can represent millions or billions of times the mass of the sun, according to NASA).
Scientists have never found convincing evidence of the existence of medium-mass black holes in our galaxy. This stellar fugue is still not an irrefutable proof of their existence, but it reinforces the fact that black holes in the middle of mass could exist, wrote the researchers. Now, "the race is made to find them", the main author of the study, Andreas Irrgang, astronomer at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said in a statement.
Originally published on Science live.
[ad_2]
Source link