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Aging Star System Leaves Strange Death Spiral
jamie tips a post at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog about an extremely unusual astronomical phenomenon originating from a binary system about 3000 light years away. Quoting:
"The name of this thing is AFGL 3068. It's been known as a bright infrared source for some time, but images just showed it as a dot. This Hubble image using the Advanced Camera for Surveys reveals an intricate, delicate and exceedingly faint spiral pattern. ... Red giants tend to blow a lot of their outer layers into space in an expanding spherical wind; think of it as a super-solar wind. The star surrounds itself with a cloud of this material, essentially enclosing it in a cocoon. In general the material isn't all that thick, but in some of these stars there is an overabundance of carbon in the outer layers which gets carried along in these winds. ... AFGL 3068 is a carbon star and most likely evolved just like this, but with a difference: it's a binary. As the two stars swing around each other, the wind from the carbon star doesn't expand in a sphere. Instead, we see a spiral pattern as the material expands."
What? Doesn't everyone know this is due to The Last Starfighter?
That's the coolest thing I've seen in a while, and how fortunate that it's oriented just right for us to see! Good to know there's always an inexhaustible supply of strange, bizarre things out there.
Given that the only way we could see this amazing sight is it to be "flat" to us in our line of sight, if it was side on we would never see this in the glory that is there to be seen.
Makes me wonder the same thing about all the planet hunters and exo-planets that we are finding - how many more would we be able to find if it didn't rely on having just the right angle from our vantage point...
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
It's a point. What you're seeing is lens flare and glare in the optics. The only star whose surface has been resolved into a disk is Betelgeuse, a red giant star located in Orion.
And Sol of course.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
...at least according to Larry Niven, in "The Soft Weapon" (1967) which was remade into a Star Trek cartoon script "The Slaver Weapon".
"There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil..." - one of the first "Interstellar Tourist Attractions".
It's been depicted in fan art:
http://www.scifi-az.com/dixon/ddbetalyrae.htm ...and by the great Chesley Bonestell, who was doing astronomical paintings back before space travel, though this was in 1978:
http://www.noreascon.org/retroart/images/Bonestell,%20Double%20Star.jpg
"The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine it, it's stranger than we can imagine it. (A. Einstein)
That's a misquote. It is a garbled quote of a line actually due to biologist J. B. S. Haldane who said "My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." The line is from "Possible Worlds" (sometimes titled "Possible Worlds and Other Papers.")
Looking at that picture full resolution provided by bad astronomer, there are quite a few galaxies hanging around in the background. Awesome!
You know if you say Betelgeuse two more times that creepy pervert from the after life will appear, so be careful!.
AHHHHH DAM, I said it once so if it is said one more time, the self proclaimed "Ghost with the most" will show up. You have been warned!
Have you noticed how, since the advent of the Internet as a massive information medium, there are suddenly all classes of strange, unexplained stuff out there?
No. What I've noticed is that since the advent of the internet more and more people are getting access to really cool discoveries that would otherwise have been relegated to scientific journals, and accessed only by scientists in the related field(s).
I'm sorry... but either 21st century scientists are really lame, or we humans know *shit* about the universe and the laws that rule it. Wonder which one it is...
We know more than we've ever known before. The thing is, every time we find a real answer to something we end up creating twenty new questions. That's the way human progress has always worked, and that's why science is so friggin' awesome. The more we figure out, the more new things there are to figure out!
The star with the spiral is behind a self produced dust cloud. It makes it look more dramatic.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Basically every picture you see from space gets that treatment. They take pictures using cameras with bandpass filters in the optics, then simply assign 2 or 3 channels to colors if there's more than 1 channel. Unless they want an "as it might be seen" picture they won't use R/G/B filters.
ESA page with the full-size image.
Paper [pdf] by Mark Morris, Raghvendra Sahai, Keith Matthews, Judy Cheng, Jessica Lu, Mark Claussen and Carmen Sanchez-Contreras.
Abstract. [some formatting may be lost] The extreme carbon star, AFGL 3068, is losing mass at a rate in excess of 104 M yr1 , and has so far been detected only in the infrared because it is hidden by a thick dust photosphere having a color temperature of 300K. Using the ACS camera on HST, we have imaged AFGL 3068 with broad-band lters at 0.6 and 0.8 m and nd a thin, apparently continuous spiral arc winding 4 or 5 times around the location of the star, from angular radii of 2 to 10 arcsec. We interpret this as the projection of nested spiral shells such as were predicted to occur when the mass-losing star is a member of a binary system. In this case, the illumination is presumably provided by ambient galactic starlight. Subsequent near-IR observations with the NIRC2 camera on the Keck II telescope using adaptive optics reveal that AFGL 3068 has two components separated by 0.11 arcsec, or 109 AU at a distance of 1 kpc. One very red component is presumably the mass-losing carbon star, while the other component is apparently a much bluer companion. Assuming each component has mass M(M ), and ignoring the projection of the separation vector, we nd the binary period to be 810 M0.5 yrs, strikingly comparable to the 710-yr separation of the shells obtained from the known outow velocity of 14.7 km s1 .
"Have you noticed how, since the advent of the Internet as a massive information medium, there are suddenly all classes of strange, unexplained stuff out there?"
The communications revoultion coincides with the revolution occuring in astronomical observations because both are based on the digital revolution.
"I'm sorry... but either 21st century scientists are really lame, or we humans know *shit* about the universe and the laws that rule it. Wonder which one it is..."
"The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance" - The sidewalk astronomer.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm sorry... but either 21st century scientists are really lame, or we humans know *shit* about the universe and the laws that rule it. Wonder which one it is...
No, it's more like this: There's billions of stars out there, and when you investigate billions of something you'll find oddities. Kinda like if you observed one child birth, you'd probably get the normal one. If you looked at many you'd find twins, triplets, quadruplets = binary/trinary/???nary star systems. You'd find handicapped children, one-egged twins, two-egged twins, handicapped children, siamese twins, stillborns, people borne with extra limbs and whatnot. We have, and have had, a pretty good idea of how a normal star is formed, lives and dies. We're still working on cataloging all the exceptions and oddities, but I don't think we're that clueless.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE / Hamlet Act 1. Scene V
They're taking really long exposures with a very sensitive sensor at the limits of engineering. The star on the right many have an incoming photon flux thousands to millions of times of the faint binary system. So the relative exposure means what little diffraction effects from the reflector mountings and aperture builds up a large lens flare over time on the bright stars.