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The Blue Ring Nebula, a star with an unusual ultraviolet ring around it spotted by astronomers working on NASA’s now defunct Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission sixteen years ago, has amazed and perplexed researchers since its discovery. Now, it appears that astronomers may have finally uncovered the mystery behind it.
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It turns out that the ring around the object may actually be the base of a cone-shaped cloud of fluorescent debris created after a sun-like star collided with a smaller stellar companion, engulfing it in the process. As a result, two cones of material were fired in opposite directions, one of which was pointed directly at the Earth, appearing to GALEX as a ring.
“The merger of two stars is quite common, but they quickly become obscured by a lot of dust as ejection from them expands and cools into space, meaning we can’t see what really happened,” he said in a statement. lead study author Keri Hoadley, David and Ellen Lee’s postdoctoral physics scholar at Caltech.
“We think this object represents an advanced stage of these transient events, when the dust finally clears and we have a good view. But we also detected the process before it was too long; after time, the nebula will dissolve into the interstellar medium and we wouldn’t be able to say anything happened. “
To achieve this discovery, the team used the help of many telescopes: Caltech’s Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, the WM Keck observatory in Hawaii, the Hobby-Eberly telescope in Texas, the Spitzer NASA and the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE). With these powerful tools, the team was able to piece together the history of the Blue Ring Nebula, much to the relief of researchers who had been trying to figure it out for years.
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