A research team has used both Archival Hubble Space Telescope data and new observations to measure the binary star systems NGC3603-A1 exactly. A star weighs about 93 times the mass of our sun, while his companion spits the scales at around 70 sun mass. Together they represent one of the most massive binary systems that have ever been discovered in our galaxy.
What makes this system really exceptional is the speed of your orbital movement. The two giants circle every 3.8 days, which means that the earth has been completed around the sun for a year in the time and these star titans have mutually surrounded each other almost 100 times. Their closeness and incredible masses form a dynamic relationship that redesigned both stars.
The core of the star cluster in NGC 3603 is shown in detail in a picture from the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) camera on the NASA/ESA -Hubble world space telescope. NGC3603-A1 is the brightest (and at the top right) of the three barely solved stars in the center (loan: NASA, ESA and Wolfgang Brandner)
The discovery required detective work, which spanned years and relyed on a crucial insight from an unlikely source. Sarah Bodansky, then a student at Carleton College, worked from afar at Lowell Observatory during the Pandemian summer 2020 when she noticed what everyone in the older Hubble data had missed.
“Sarah’s work made it possible to advance this project. She noticed something that everyone had missed
This observation was the key because it revealed the binary nature of a single, blurred star. The system is located in the densely packed star cluster NGC 3603, one of the most active regions for star -bound regions in our galaxy, and could only be dissolved with the extraordinary clarity of Hubble.
Both stars are so solid and energetic that they imitate wolf jet stars, which are typically older, dying giants that blow away their outer layers with intensive outstanding winds. However, the stars in NGC 3603-A1 are actually still young and demonstrate the extreme conditions that make massive stars appear far more developed than they actually are.
The interaction between the two stars tells a fascinating story of the outstanding evolution. The smaller of the couple seems to have stolen the mass from its larger companion, which means that it turns faster. This type of mass transmission is crucial to understand how massive stars change over time and provides insights into its ultimate fate.
“For the most massive stars, astronomers usually have to rely on models that are not very limited to weigh the star. However, this study focused on a special type of binary system in which we can get a more fundamental measurement of its mass.” – Sarah Bodansky from Carleton College
Massive binary systems such as NGC 3603-A1 are the forerunners of binary black holes that ultimately merged and can generate waves of gravity that scientists have recognized since 2015. Understanding these stellar relationships helps astronomers, predictions where and when such collisions could occur.
Source: Astronomers show a massive binary star system in a milky way
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