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When the Blue Ring Nebula was first spotted by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), teenager Keri Hoadley said goodbye to middle School, and astronomers couldn’t figure out what that faint gas bubble with a star in the center was. Now astrophysics and mathematics Keri Hoadley and her team have the answer: it’s the youngest known example of two stars merged into one.
According to the researchers, the nebula was formed by the recent stellar merger between the remains of a sun like ours and those of another star 10% of its size. In agony, the largest star became a supergiant, dangerously approaching its mate, attracting her.
The tiny star, when swallowed, expelled its debris in a ring around the now swollen sun. The violent event that led to the formation of the Blue Ring Nebula sent a hot cloud of debris into space, which ended up splitting in two, both cone-shaped and traveling in opposite directions.
The mystery of blue light
Let’s go back to 2004, when scientists saw the blue nebula. GALEX was designed to understand star formation by censoring populations of young stars in other galaxies using ultraviolet light.
Most of the stars captured by GALEX radiated near ultraviolet, which appears in the images in yellow, and far ultraviolet, represented by blue: the mysterious nebula emitted only this light. The object inside looked like the remnants of a supernova or a dying star like the sun.
Or Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX).Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Disclosure
But what was inside the Blue Ring Nebula was not rubble, but a living star. And it did not emit other wavelengths of light; only blue light. Two years passed and the GALEX team, using the telescope of the Palomar Observatory and those of the WM Keck Observatory, discovered that something violent had happened to the star and that it was attracting a large amount of material to itself. But where?
“For a long time we thought there was a gift planet being torn apart by the star, sending gas out of the system,” said astrophysicist Mark Seibert, a member of the GALEX team.
Mathematics and computer science
Between 2012 and 2017, the GALEX team collected data obtained from eight telescopes, historical observations of the star from 1895 and more from citizen scientists. The nebula, however, remained unexplained.
It was then that Keri Hoadley joined GALEX and took it upon herself to put an end to the mystery. The solution would have come from applying the collected data to mathematical and computational models: the help of the theoretical astrophysicist specialist in cosmic fusion simulations Brian Metzger was unique.
The Blue Ring Nebula.Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech / GALEX / Disclosure
Although common and fused star systems are nearly impossible to study immediately after formation due to the debris resulting from the collision. When they eventually disperse, the systems are difficult to identify because they resemble unfused stars.
The missing link would be the Blue Ring Nebula: a star system a few thousand years after merging, when evidence of the union is still abundant, including its distinctive blue light. As the nebula cooled, molecules of stardust and hydrogen formed; these began to collide with energetic particles that fill the space between the stars (the interstellar medium) and, energized, radiated the blue light captured by GALEX.
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