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Scientists have discovered new evidence in the mysterious fluorescent debris of the Blue Ring Nebula this may explain how the strange structure was formed.
The Blue Ring Nebula is home to a central star known as TYC 2597-735-1. An unusual ultraviolet ring surrounds the star, which astronomers first observed in 2004 using the now defunct NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) space telescope. Until now, the formation of this particular ring – it actually is invisible ultraviolet light which was coded with the blue color in the telescope images – has largely remained a mystery.
“Whenever we thought we understood this, something would tell us, ‘No, that’s not right,'”, Mark Seibert, Carnegie Institution for Science astrophysicist, member of the GALEX team and co-author of the new research, he said in a statement. “It’s a scary thing as a scientist. But I also like how unique this object is and the effort so many people put in to understand it.”
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 bright molecular hydrogen extending from the central star towards Earth. The new observations also show a second cone-shaped cloud extending from the star in the opposite direction.
The cone-shaped cloud bases appear to overlap when viewed from Earth, creating the ring shape around the star, Christopher Martin, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and former principal investigator of GALEX, said in a press conference. digital format on Tuesday (November 17), before the research was made public.
The scientists behind the new research believe that the clouds of fluorescent debris formed after a solar star it collided and consumed a smaller stellar companion just a few thousand years ago. Recent observations capture a never-before-seen evolutionary phase of a stellar collision.
“The merging of two stars is quite common, but they are quickly obscured by a lot of dust as the ejection from them expands and cools into space, which means we can’t see what really happened,” Keri Hoadley, lead author of the studio and a physicist at Caltech, said in the statement.
The timing of the new observations was instrumental in helping scientists understand the phenomenon. “It’s like seeing a baby walking for the first time,” Don Neill, an astrophysicist at Caltech and a member of the GALEX team, said in the statement. “If you blink, you might lose it.”
It was that moment that allowed the researchers to really see what was going on. “We think this object represents an advanced stage of these transient events, when the dust finally clears and we have a good view,” Hoadley said. “But we also detected the process before it was too long; after time, the nebula it will dissolve in the interstellar medium and we would not be able to say that anything happened. “
The stellar collision sent a cloud of hot debris into space. As the debris flew out, 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 investigation explorer (WISE), which revealed excess infrared emissions around the central star of the Blue Ring Nebula. These observations suggest the star is surrounded by a disk of dust that absorbs the star’s light and then radiates back into the infrared. The researchers believe this disk cut the debris cloud surrounding the star in half, creating the two cone-shaped clouds that extend in opposite directions.
The results were published today (November 18) in Nature magazine.
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