1/17/2024 0 Comments Star moving background![]() We have only been observing these gravitational waves for a few years now, and these have been found to be due to merging black holes. Prof Oudmaijer said, "There's a revolution going on in physics at the moment around gravitational waves. The discovery could have huge impacts on other areas of astronomy-including our understanding of black holes, neutron stars and gravitational wave sources. ![]() Many of such binaries will at some point transfer mass from one star to another, a kind of stellar vampirism depicted in this artist's impression. However, Principal Investigator Prof Oudmaijer said, "The fact that we do not see them might be because they are now too faint to be detected."Īrtist's impression of a vampire star (left) stealing material from its victim: New research using data from ESO's Very Large Telescope has revealed that the hottest and brightest stars, which are known as O stars, are often found in close pairs. This is interesting because we'd expect them to have a higher rate." "We applied this across the two groups of stars that we are looking at-the B stars and the Be stars-and what we found, confusingly, is that at first it looks like the Be stars have a lower rate of companions than the B stars. If a star moves in a straight line, we know there's just one star, but if there is more than one, we will see a slight wobble or, in the best case, a spiral. Dodd added, "We observed the way the stars move across the night sky, over longer periods like 10 years, and shorter periods of around six months. Calçada.īut now, by analyzing data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, the scientists say they have found evidence these stars actually exist in triple systems-with three bodies interacting instead of just two. This artist's animation shows what the system might look like it's composed of an oblate star with a disc around it (a Be "vampire" star foreground) and B-type star that has been stripped of its atmosphere (background). The scientists, a KU Leuven-ESO team, believe they have observed this binary system in a brief moment after one of the stars sucked the atmosphere off its companion, a phenomenon often referred to as "stellar vampirism". New research using data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and Very Large Telescope Interferometer has revealed that HR 6819, previously believed to be a triple system with a black hole, is in fact a system of two stars with no black hole. Dodd, corresponding author of the research, said, "The best point of reference for that is if you've watched Star Wars, there are planets where they have two suns." And although Be stars have been known for about 150 years-having first been identified by renowned Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi in 1866-until now, no one has known how they were formed.Ĭonsensus among astronomers so far has said the disks are formed by the rapid rotation of the Be stars, and that itself can be caused by the stars interacting with another star in a binary system. ![]() These Be stars are surrounded by a characteristic disk made of gas-similar to the rings of Saturn in our own solar system. The remarkable discovery could revolutionize our understanding of the objects-a subset of B stars-which are considered an important "test bed" for developing theories on how stars evolve more generally. student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars-until now mainly thought to exist in double stars-could in fact be "triples."
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