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T.HIS IMAGE shows the 5,000-year-old consequences of a merger between two stars, even though the light that created it took another 6,000 years to reach Earth’s vicinity. It was published in Nature this week by Keri Hoadley of the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues. It is a composite of three images taken at different frequencies, two from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a space telescope that operated from 2003 to 2012, and one from the ground. The blue area represents the gas expelled during melting. The faint red rings are the visible traces of the shock waves from the resulting explosion. Such collisions are reasonably common in binary star systems. But this image is considered one of the clearest consequences so far.■
This article appeared in the Science and Technology section of the print edition with the title “Stars in collision”
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