VFTS 243 was observed first as a single star 25 times the mass of the sun, then as a single star that had a companion. The research appears now in Nature Astronomy. It was discovered at the European Southern Observatory, in Chile, by the aptly named Very Large Telescope. That’s what researchers believe happened to the binary star VFTS 243 in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. Or both stars can stay together until one simply reaches the end of its long life. One star can basically “eject” the other, which is what some scientists believe could have happened to a theoretical sun-paired star tantalizingly named Nemesis. When they grow too close, one of two very different things can happen. Young stars start farther apart but many are part of pairs, and older stars have moved closer together over billions of years. It follows logically that they’d snag each other and start the long, slow process of orbiting closer and closer together-like the quarter you drop into a spiral wishing well. Because of their powerful gravities, stars have huge fields of influence on the space around them. But this idea also makes intuitive sense. They may be up to 10,000 or more light years apart, which can make them challenging to pick out.
It turns out that scientists believe most stars are part of binary star systems, meaning two stars that are gravitationally stuck together at some distance and end up orbiting each other.
0 kommentar(er)
