Weird stellar remnant may be from one of the first stars in the universe.

Astronomers have detected an extremely unusual star that they believe is a stellar fossil, or remnant, of one of the universe's very first stars.

The star, named AS0039, is located in the Sculptor dwarf galaxy around 290,000 light-years from the solar system. This stellar remnant has the lowest concentration of metal, particularly iron, of any star measured outside the Milky Way. The researchers think that finding is evidence that the remnant is a direct descendent of one of the universe's earliest stars, which contained very little metal.

Cheers.

Strange white dwarf switches 'on' and 'off' in front of astronomers.

A spacecraft that usually seeks new worlds saw a white dwarf suddenly switch "off" with a swift drop in brightness. Then it switched back on again.

This observation represents the first time astronomers saw a white dwarf change its luminosity, or inherent brightness, so quickly, and may have implications for how we understand the process of accretion (or building up material) at many types of celestial objects.

White dwarfs are the remnants of much larger stars approximately the size of our sun that have burned off all the hydrogen that previously fueled them. As such, sometimes astronomers say that looking at white dwarf systems helps us learn about our own solar system's distant future, when the sun runs out of hydrogen in about 5 billion years.

The new star research was conducted using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), whose main mission is to seek Earth-size worlds relatively close to our own planet, on a larger quest to understand how prolific life may be in the universe. In this case, TESS spotted the fluctuating brightness at a star called TW Pictoris, which is roughly 1,400 light-years from Earth.

The luminosity changes took place because the white dwarf is pulling off material from a nearby companion star, in a process known as accretion. As the white dwarf "feeds" off its companion, it grows brighter.

The white dwarf lost luminosity in only 30 minutes, much faster than other white dwarfs that have faded over several days or months. Why is still unknown, as the flow of material on to the white dwarf's accretion disc should be constant, but astronomers suspect it might be due to fluctuations in the dwarf's magnetic field.

The Hottest White Dwarf We Know of Is Up to Something Ghoulish With Its Neighbor.

There's a dead star behaving very oddly 1,300 light-years away.

It's a white dwarf named KPD 0005+5106, and X-ray data from the Chandra space telescope have revealed that it's enacting extreme violence on an orbiting companion. Not only is it siphoning material from this object (which, to be fair, is pretty normal for white dwarfs), the star is giving its companion an absolute drubbing by blasting it with radiation from close proximity.

Even more interestingly, we can't see what the companion actually is, making it tricky to predict its eventual fate, including how long it will take to be completely destroyed and what that will mean for the white dwarf.

"We didn't know this white dwarf had a companion before we saw the X-ray data," said astronomer You-Hua Chu of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA) in Taiwan. "We've looked for the companion with optical light telescopes but haven't seen anything, which means it is a very dim star, a brown dwarf, or a planet."

White dwarfs are what happens to a star under about eight times the mass of the Sun once it runs out of elements it can fuse in its core. As the fuel runs low, it will eject its outer layers into space until finally, the core is no longer able to support itself and collapses under its own gravity into a dense object about the size of Earth (and sometimes even smaller).

Although it may be without fuel to fuse, the white dwarf remains extremely hot, so hot that it will continue to shine brightly with thermal radiation for billions of years. The average white dwarf will have a temperature of over 100,000 Kelvin (99,727 degrees Celsius or 179,540 degrees Fahrenheit) once its core stops contracting. The Sun, for context, has an effective temperature of 5,772 Kelvin......

Cheers.

Scientists Said These Stars Were Too Small to Exist, But We Finally Know Their Secret.

Astronomers have finally observed the satisfying solution to a perplexing cosmic problem: the apparent mystery of stars that are basically too small to exist.

White dwarfs that are considered to be too tiny to exist in the current lifetime of the Universe have now, however, been spotted having their mass slurped off by binary companions – a mechanism long suspected that might explain their size, but never before proven in the wild.

These 'missing link' binaries are called evolved cataclysmic variables, and their discovery helps us understand one of the stages on the evolutionary path of dead stars.

"We have observed the first physical proof of a new population of transitional binary stars," says astronomer Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"This is exciting; it's a missing evolutionary link in binary star formation models that we've been looking for."

White dwarfs are what becomes of a star less than about eight times the mass of the Sun when it runs out of fuel for the process of nuclear fusion.

The dying star ejects most of its mass, and the core collapses down into an extremely dense object – up to about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, packed into a sphere around the size of Earth (although they can vary).

On rare occasions, however, they can be so low in mass that, according to our models of stellar evolution, they shouldn't exist. These extremely low-mass white dwarfs, or ELMs, are only around one-third of the mass of the Sun. Such mass loss should take far longer than the current lifetime of the Universe, which is only around 13.8 billion years.....

...."We found the evolutionary link between two classes of binary stars – cataclysmic variables and ELM white dwarfs – and we found a decent number of them."

Most of the binaries consisted of a white dwarf around 0.15 times the mass of the Sun, with companions around 0.8 times the mass of the Sun.

All of the white dwarfs showed signs of mass loss to their companion stars; for 13 of the stars, the process was still ongoing, while the remaining eight were no longer losing mass, but were puffy, as though mass loss was recent. All 21 of the stars were hotter and brighter than usually seen in a cataclysmic variable white dwarf.

More work is needed in order to fully understand the population of evolved cataclysmic variables, including more detailed observations of the 21 binaries. The team also hopes to go back and take a closer look at the other 29 binaries from the initial 50 candidates.

Cheers.

Fastest nova ever recorded burns out in just one day.

The fastest nova star explosion ever seen has been recorded by astronomers.

They watched as a white dwarf star 'stole' gas from a nearby red giant and triggered a blast bright enough to be witnessed from Earth with binoculars.

Named V1674 Hercules, the nova explosion occurred 100 light-years away on June 12 last year but lasted for just a day — up to three times quicker than any previously observed.

A nova is a sudden explosion of bright light from a two-star system. Every nova is created by a white dwarf – the very dense leftover core of a star – and a nearby companion star.

Experts from Arizona State University hope their observation will help answer larger questions about the chemistry of our solar system, the death of stars and the evolution of the universe...

Cheers.

Meet the 'zombie star' that survived a supernova blast.

Astronomers have observed in a relatively nearby galaxy a star that not only survived what ordinarily should have been certain death - a stellar explosion called a supernova - but emerged from it brighter than before the blast.

Meet the "zombie star."

The star at issue, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, is a kind known as a white dwarf, an incredibly dense object with about the mass of the sun crammed into the size of Earth. A white dwarf is the remaining core of a star that blew off a lot of its material at the end of its life cycle, as our sun is expected to do about 5 billion years from now.

This white dwarf is gravitationally locked in orbit with another star - a pairing called a binary system - and with its strong gravitational pull siphoned off and incorporated a good deal of material from this unfortunate companion.

That is where the trouble started. In doing so, the white dwarf reached a mass threshold - about 1.4 times that of the sun - that caused thermonuclear reactions in its core that made it detonate in a supernova, an event that should have killed it....

Cheers.

How much can a neutron star take before it collapses into a black hole?

Gluttonous cosmic 'black widow' is heaviest-known neutron star.

Astronomers have observed the most massive known example of an object called a neutron star, one classified as a "black widow" that got particularly hefty by gobbling up most of the mass of a stellar companion trapped in an unhappy cosmic marriage.

The researchers said the neutron star, wildly spinning at 707 times per second, has a mass about 2.35 times greater than that of our sun, putting it perhaps at the maximum possible mass for such objects before they would collapse to form a black hole.

A neutron star is the compact collapsed core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova at the end of its life cycle. The one described by the researchers is a highly magnetized type of neutron star called a pulsar that unleashes beams of electromagnetic radiation from its poles. As it spins, these beams appear from the perspective of an observer on Earth to pulse - akin to a lighthouse's rotating light.

Only one other neutron star is known to spin more quickly than this one....

I guess that we'll eventually find out.

Cheers.

It is still defying explanation.

Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Blew Its Top in a Violent Explosion, Baffling Scientists.

When the bright, red supergiant star Betelgeuse blew its top in 2019, the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories were there to see it. Through this surface mass ejection, Betelgeuse offloaded 400 billion times as much mass as the sun does during a typical coronal mass ejection, a regular event in which the sun casts off part of its outer atmosphere, called the corona.

This wasn’t some sort of supernovae finale event, though. Betelgeuse—one of the most prominent stars in the Milky Way, a part of the Orion constellation—still seemingly acts like a normal star, and may even be recovering. After analyzing the 2019 data, astronomers have concluded that this is behavior we’ve never seen before in a normal star....

Cheers.

Bang!

Supernova explosion that ripped star apart 11.5 billion years ago detected by Hubble telescope.

Around 11.5 billion years ago, a giant red star collapsed and exploded, creating a spectacular supernova in the early universe.

Light from the star's cataclysmic death made its way through space and time to eventually be captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010.

But it was not discovered until a team of scientists, led by Wenlei Chen of the University of Minnesota, trawled through Hubble's archives.

"This could be the earliest core-collapse supernova [yet discovered]," Dr Chen said.

Hubble caught the moments just after the star exploded in a series of three images, the team reports today in the journal Nature...

Cheers.

Colliding Neutron Stars Created a Neutron Star We Thought Too Heavy to Exist.

A flash of light emitted by colliding neutron stars has once again upended our understanding of how the Universe works.

Analysis of the short gamma-ray burst spat out as the two stars merged revealed that, rather than forming a black hole, as expected, the immediate product of the merger was a highly magnetized neutron star far heavier than the estimated maximum neutron star mass.

This magnetar seems to have persisted for over a day before collapsing down into a black hole.

"Such a massive neutron star with a long life expectancy is not normally thought to be possible," astronomer Nuria Jordana-Mitjans of the University of Bath in the UK told The Guardian. "It is a mystery why this one was so long-lived."...

Cheers.

Epic Cosmic Blast Is Unlike Anything Astronomers Have Seen Before.

Highly energetic blasts from across the universe called long gamma ray bursts have long been connected to the collapse of massive stars, but astronomers say they've traced a nearly minute-long burst to a surprising and rare phenomenon, challenging long-held scientific beliefs about some of the most powerful objects in the universe. 

Astrophysicists spotted a 50-second GRB (any GRB over two seconds is classified as a long GRB) in December 2021, which was cataloged as GRB211211A and estimated to be situated about a billion light-years from Earth -- close on the scale of the universe. Upon more detailed investigation, they were stunned to track the burst back to a kilonova, a rare event resulting from a highly dense neutron star merging with a compact, powerful object like a black hole or another neutron star....

Cheers.

There's a zombie epidemic going on out there.

Astronomers find a group of zombie stars 20 times hotter than the Sun.

Not even two weeks into 2023, an international team of astronomers has already announced they have found eight of the hottest new stars in the cosmos. Well, not new, maybe — these eight extremely hot white dwarfs are near the end of their lives, according to a paper published this week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

These tiny zombie stars — about the size of the Earth, with the mass of the Sun, but more than twenty times hotter — offer astronomers a way to see what goes on inside the largest of all stars.

WHAT’S NEW — These eight, some of the hottest known stars, were found during a survey of regular white dwarfs by the Southern African Large Telescope, located in the Roggeveld Mountains of South Africa. “I don’t know what I might have expected, how many I might have expected to find,” Simon Jeffrey, an astronomer at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium and the lead author of the paper, tells Inverse, but to “find so many that are extreme” in “a bucketful of two or three hundred stars” was serendipitous.

Of course, all stars are hot compared with anything we’re used to here on Earth. But while the Sun’s surface chills at a steady 6,000 degrees Kelvin, these stars’ extreme temperatures range from 100,000 to 180,000 degrees....

Cheers.

Stars are on the run.

Runaway Star Is Absolutely Baffling Scientists.

According to ScienceAlert, astronomers have identified six new runaway stars, two of which are moving faster than any previously recorded. The speed measurements are taken according to the stars’ heliocentric radial velocities, that is, their velocities with respect to a fixed point-namely, Earth. The slower of the two fastest stars is J1235, traveling at 1,694 kilometers (1,053 miles) per second, while J0927 has an even greater speed of 2,285 kilometers (1,420 miles) per second.

These two runaway stars are among four newly measured hypervelocity stars, which are stars that travel faster than the Milky Way’s own escape velocity. Astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry and a team at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics believe these stars are probably the product of Type Ia supernovae. These supernovae occur in binary systems of two stars orbiting each other and, because they reach a fairly consistent critical mass, have a peak luminosity that can be used as a standard for measuring the distance to their host galaxies.

This “standard candles” measurement has provided a new way to calculate the rate of the birth of runaway stars, and the team has found this rate to be consistent with that of Type Ia supernovae. The team’s findings were published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. According to the research paper, there might be a great deal more of these stars to be found.

A runaway star is the product of an exploding star, bits of which can be tossed out into space at great velocity by the force of the explosion. It is believed that hypervelocity stars are created by D6 supernovae, which have an even greater explosive force, and are so named for their “dynamically driven double-degenerate double-detonation.” A Type Ia supernova occurs when a dying white dwarf is orbiting another star closely enough that, as it begins to collapse, it siphons matter from the other star.....

Just so long as they don't run in this direction I'm fine with them doing so.

Cheers.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

A Dying Star Is Doing Something Scientists Have Never Seen Before.

The universe is about to shine bright like a diamond, like a really big cosmic diamond, according to new research from Cornell University. A dying star lovingly named HD 190412 C is running out of fuel now that it's 4.2 billion years old, causing it to cool down and crystallize its carbon and oxygen, which will turn it into a space diamond. As far as an afterlifes goes, this star is going to have a pretty bright one.

Unfortunately, us earthlings are not able to see this dying star with our naked eyes since it is roughly 104 light years away. Since one light year is approximately six trillion miles away, we'll let you do the math to understand just how far away HD 190412 C is from Earth. This means the astrophysicists at Cornell either have some seriously powerful telescopes, or they're sending the Guardians of the Galaxy out to do this research for them.

When it comes to a traditional diamond, scientists speculate that the sparkling stone can take anywhere from one billion to three billion years to properly form. That may seem like a long time, but dying star HD 190412 C will take about a quadrillion years (a million billion years) to turn into a diamond. Hopefully, there isn't a princess out there waiting for this diamond to be used for a proposal.

This particular dying star is categorized as a white dwarf star, meaning it's a very dense star that has run out of its nuclear fuel. While more massive stars will burst into a supernova or become a black hole when they die, a white dwarf crystallizes and becomes a diamond. Our Sun will eventually become a white dwarf star when it runs out of fuel in about six billion years when mankind will most likely be long gone.......

Cheers.

Should metal be common for everything in the Universe?

In the universe of Astronomy:

Anything heavier than hydrogen is described as 'metal'. That is: All products of nuclear fusion.

The proportion of 'metals' in the spectra for a star, or for an entire galaxy, gives a clue to the age and evolution...


Keep searchin'!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Vera pulsar pouring out 200 times more energy than thought possible, scientists discover.

Pulsars are what is leftover after supernova explosions demolish stars. Although these dead stars measure just about 20 kilometers across in size, they rotate super fast and are extremely dense, with a teaspoon of a pulsar's mass weighing in at about a billion tons if we could somehow transport it back to Earth.

These dead stars emanate rotating beams of electromagnetic radiation called gamma rays like a lighthouse, which we can observe from our vantage point on Earth as a light flashing on and off. The so-called Vela pulsar, which is about 1,000 light years away and can be observed from the Southern hemisphere, has the brightest gamma-ray emission of any pulsar known. A new study published in Nature Astronomy today found the amount of energy the Vela pulsar puts out is far greater than once thought. Researchers at the H.E.S.S. observatory in Namibia found the gamma rays emitted 20 tera-electronvolts, which is 10 trillion times the energy of visible light and 200 times higher than any other radiation ever detected from the Vela pulsar...

A repeat performance could be on the cards soon.

Exploding nova T Coronae Borealis could be on show for the first time in 80 years. Here's how to spot it.

Australians may catch a glimpse of a stellar explosion in the next few months — if predictions are correct.

T Coronae Borealis, aka "the Blaze Star", last lit up the sky 80 years ago, and astronomers believe it's ready to go off again.

While scientists are divided on exactly when it will explode, they agree it will be an exciting event, and have their telescopes trained on it.

"Pretty much a hydrogen bomb explodes on the surface [of a star]," Tanya Hill, an astronomer and curator at the Melbourne Planetarium says.

"I think that's pretty neat."

Whether or not we'll be able to see it will come down to timing.

Here's what you need to know about this astronomical event, and how to maximise your chances of seeing it in Australia........

Cheers.