{"id":41914,"date":"2016-10-19T03:58:03","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T07:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/utnews.utoledo.edu\/?p=41914"},"modified":"2016-10-19T11:33:16","modified_gmt":"2016-10-19T15:33:16","slug":"ut-astronomer-helps-capture-first-sharp-image-of-famous-exploding-stars-raging-winds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/10_19_2016\/ut-astronomer-helps-capture-first-sharp-image-of-famous-exploding-stars-raging-winds","title":{"rendered":"UT astronomer helps capture first sharp image of famous exploding star’s raging winds"},"content":{"rendered":"

A researcher at The University of Toledo is part of an international team of astronomers pioneering a new way to understand how extremely massive stars lose mass as they evolve.<\/p>\n

\"Richardson\"<\/a>

Richardson<\/p><\/div>The research team focused on the most luminous and massive stellar system in the Milky Way galaxy called Eta Carinae. Its primary star is 100 times more massive and five million times more luminous than the sun. That star also is famous for losing 10 suns worth of material \u2014\u00a0huge amounts of gas and dust \u2014 into space in an enormous explosion in the 1830s.<\/p>\n

These astronomers are the first to use what is called the Very Large Telescope Interferometer at the the European Southern Observatory in Chile to study the violent wind collision zone between two stars in the system and discover new and unexpected structures.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The nebula surrounding Eta Carinae as imaged with the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope at left. At right is a high-resolution image of the wind collision zone in the central region of Eta Carinae. The two red dots indicate the positions of the two stars.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\u201cThe scale of the images is roughly equivalent to being able to read the small print in a newspaper from 50 miles away,\u201d said Dr. Noel Richardson, postdoctoral research associate in UT\u2019s Department of Physics and Astronomy.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s methods used to revolutionize infrared astronomy and the resulting discoveries recently were published in the international journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>

This 3-D print of wind collision cavity in Eta Carinae system is based on models of Dr. Thomas Madura at San Jose University.<\/p><\/div>The researchers used interferometry, which is a technique combining the light from up to four telescopes to obtain an image about 10 times higher than the resolution of the largest single telescope.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s phenomenal,\u201d said Richardson, who earned his bachelor\u2019s degree in mathematics and master\u2019s degree in physics from UT in 2004 and 2006. \u201cUntil now, we couldn\u2019t study the Eta Carinae star system\u2019s wind collision zone because it was too small for the largest telescope.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Eta Carinae star system is 7,500 light years from Earth where winds from two tightly orbiting stars smash together at speeds up to 10 million kilometers per hour approximately every five years. Temperatures reach many tens of millions of degrees \u2013 enough to emit X-rays.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>

This shows three 1.8-meter telescopes of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory in Chile.<\/p><\/div>Richardson said the star is too far south to observe from UT\u2019s telescope. The collaborators in South America sent him data to analyze every night in mid-2014, the last time the stars passed close to each other. Richardson observed the images with spectroscopy and spotted structures in the data that hadn\u2019t been seen before.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve learned the secondary star\u2019s wind is carving a cavity into the primary star\u2019s enormous wind,\u201d Richardson said. \u201cWe saw large structures pushed out into space after the winds collide, were able to pinpoint how they were moving, and learned they keep that geometric shape. It\u2019s amazing to see the tails coming off, which are the shocks in the secondary star going into orbit. We have computer and 3-D print models that can now explain the X-rays, Hubble Space Telescope observations, unusual spectroscopic features, and the incredible images from the Very Large Telescope Interferometer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur dreams came true because we can now get extremely sharp images in the infrared regime,\u201d said Dr. Gerd Weigelt of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, who led the team of astronomers from the U.S., Canada, Chile, Japan and Brazil.<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Richardson\u2019s work is a nice example of the kinds of international collaborations with which our UT astronomers are involved,\u201d said Dr. Karen Bjorkman, dean of the UT College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy and Helen Luedtke Brooks Endowed Professor of Astronomy. \u201cThe results, which use data from the Hubble Space Telescope, show a very interesting way to map the fossil remnants of material thrown off by a famously unstable binary star system.\u00a0I congratulate him on this work and am proud to note that he is a UT alumnus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richardson hopes this new research helps astronomers come closer to understanding what triggered Eta Carinae\u2019s explosion in the 1800s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is one of the driving motivators for myself,\u201d Richardson said. \u201cHow do we connect the physics of what is happening today to what happened back then? There is still a lot we don\u2019t understand about the stars we have looked up and seen in the sky for a long time. Science is a process, and we want to push the envelope to solve the mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Noel Richardson, postdoctoral research associate in UT\u2019s Department of Physics and Astronomy, is part of a team studying the violent wind collision zone between two stars in the Milky Way and discovering new and unexpected structures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":812,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1,3,7],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/812"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41914"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41932,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41914\/revisions\/41932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}