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Astronomers Find Star-Within-a-Star, 40 Years After First Theorized
derekmead writes: After 40 years, astronomers have likely found a rather strange celestial body known as a Thorne–Zytkow object (TZO), in which a neutron star is absorbed by a red supergiant. Originally predicted in the 1970s, the first non-theoretical TZO was found earlier this year, based on calculations presented in a paper forthcoming in MNRAS.
TZOs were predicted by astronomer Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, who wasthen postdoctoral fellow at CalTech. The pair imagined what might happen if a neutron star in a binary system merged with its partner red supergiant. This wouldn't be like two average stars merging. Neutron stars are the ancient remnants of stars that grew too big and exploded. Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across — as they shed material out into space. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the galaxy, with radii up to 800 times that of our sun, but they aren't dense.
TZOs were predicted by astronomer Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, who wasthen postdoctoral fellow at CalTech. The pair imagined what might happen if a neutron star in a binary system merged with its partner red supergiant. This wouldn't be like two average stars merging. Neutron stars are the ancient remnants of stars that grew too big and exploded. Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across — as they shed material out into space. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the galaxy, with radii up to 800 times that of our sun, but they aren't dense.
It's not exactly English, but definitely in the Germanic family.
IANAA, but this sounds like an extremely unstable setup. What am I take make of this?
- Is the research reliable?
- How can such a thing be stable? Is there any particular process that keeps one star inside the other?
- What even /is/ such a body? If you were to travel from the outside to the midpoint of the body, would you encounter two barriers of destructing heat, with some emptiness (I'd like to say "vacuum" but of course space is not exactly a vacuum) in between?
Or is it actually just something entirely unlike what you would imagine when someone says "star within a star"?
Just imagine a block of the most dense visible thing in the universe crashing into a star so large you could fit a good chunk of the inner solar system in.
I can't be the only person who'd want to watch that firework display.
Sounds like a mixed-drink with specific gravity setup...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yo Dawg, we heard you like stars.
I was thinking the same thing, it would be an interesting event to witness. The only sad thing about living when we do, is we will never get to watch solar collisions from under 100 AU.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It lasts for several hundred thousand years but the red giant is eventually absorbed into the neutron star which becomes a slightly larger neutron star or possibly a black hole.
So the red giant is just a big meal that takes a while to eat. But if you look around enough, you can find one in the middle of its course.
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Shit people, the Oncier experiment with the Klikiss torch was the beginning of a fucking mess with the Hydrogues. Some race or two, somewhere, are gonna get annihilated over that.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yo dawg... I heard you like shining. So I put a star inside your star, so you can shine while you shine.
you are....Rolling Stones. TFA said star within a star.
with in a post - within a post - within a post - (it's posts all the way down!)
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
If Kip Thorne can win a year's worth of Playboys for his bet that Cygnus X1 was a Black Hole, when current theory from Professor Hawking says Black Holes don't really exist, then can Professor Thorne please give me a year's subscription to the porno of my choice due to the non-existent bet that this wasn't such a star?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All he had to say was, "Oh my god, it's full of stars" and the line went dead.
I'm impressed, you wrote all that an couldn't even be bothered to read the summary.
Perhaps, yeah, um, you could go back and actually, you know, read the summary?
Yeah. That would be nice.
http://xkcd.com/224/
Table-ized A.I.
... and it took all of three seconds to find the article-within-the-article. Star Within a Star: Thorne-Zytkow Object Discovered (04 June 2014)
... not CalTech.
Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across
Looks like a vague "20km" gained a couple of orders of magnitude in precision (2 extra significant figures).
This is bad journalism even when its not science.
"Mr Smith was reported as saying 'You look like 772,000 Euros!'"
Just think about the tidal forces associated as that neutron star enters the red giant.
It could go straight, or nearly straight in, or they could have been locked in a death spiral as the neutron star spirals in, causing massive deformation to the surface of the star as the plasma impacts impenetrable mass of the neutron star.
There's a limit to how fast the neutron star can impact the RG. If the NS is going too fast, it will simply blast through and they will never be locked together. Perhaps even blast through the core and making for a really big boom.
These things are really really stable, well in theory.
The fusion on the surface of the neutron star keeps the red giant inflated so the normal evolution doesn't (shouldn't happen :) ).
IF there were a long lived star traveling race, this might be a good place to set up shop.
You have a few stars worth of neutornium the size of a big asteroid or maybe a small moon moving towards a red giant that is perhaps similar in mass to our own sun.
I can buy that eventually the one ends up inside the other. What I wonder about is how you get from a neutron star falling towards a red giant to a neutron star inside a red giant.
I'd think the neutron star would have so much momentum that it would basically blast right through the star and come out the other side.
Of course, a more likely scenario is a mutual orbit where over many orbits the stars interact via their extended atmospheres/etc slowing their orbits until they merge. Still, I'd think that neutron star would keep making orbital passes deeper and deeper into the red giant's atmosphere, basically plowing a trench into the red giant which of course fills right back in each time.
I just don't see either star changing velocity enough on a single pass for them to merge.
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