Astronomers detected a star with a very interesting composition and concluded that the star must have been enriched by a supernova, which is inconsistent with our current understanding of exploding stars. Their efforts to recreate this event reveal that perhaps we have missed something big about the behavior of the first generation of giant stars.
In 1999, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) detected a giant red star 13,000 light-years away, labeled J0931+0038. The star was unusual in its color and position within the galaxy’s halo, but it was not exceptional, so it was ignored for more than 20 years until SDSS acquired its spectrum last year.
“As soon as we saw the spectrum, we emailed the rest of the team to discuss how we could learn more,” said Dr. Alex Gee of the University of Chicago. statement.
The first stars were just hydrogen and helium, but they produced heavier elements, which were incorporated into later generations. Certain elements tend to accompany each other. For example, the total amount of heavier elements in a star is often summarized based on the iron to hydrogen ratio. This is because iron provides a good starting point for estimating all other abundances.
However, there are times when stars don’t follow the rules. J0931+0038 is an extreme example. All odd-numbered elements on the periodic table are rarer than the even-numbered elements on either side. Elements such as nickel and zinc, which are just above iron in atomic weight, have abundant peaks compared to elements just below, such as titanium, or heavier elements, such as palladium.
“Sometimes we see one of these features at the same time, but we’ve never seen them all in the same star before,” said Jennifer Johnson, a professor at Ohio State University. states.
Even though J0931+0038 is probably quite old, it likely only produced helium and perhaps a small amount of carbon itself, so the other elements are the legacy of a supernova whose products constitute a supernova. This must have been an extraordinary explosion to produce such an unusual combination.In honor of last year sense of popular culture, the SDSS team named it Barbenheimer Star. After all, his one subject in these films is involved in the creation of many elements, albeit through fission rather than fusion, and his other film is quite a spectacle.
The quest to determine the nature of Babenheimer stars has now begun. The team believes it must have fallen into a mass gap between 50 and 80 times the mass of the Sun. It was thought that stars this massive would collapse directly into a black hole rather than explode into a supernova, but so far no one can explain J0931+0038 any other way.
“Surprisingly, existing models of element formation cannot explain what we are seeing,” said Dr. Sanjana Curtis from the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s not like, ‘OK, just tweak a few things here and there and it’ll work out.’ The whole pattern of elements almost seems self-contradictory.”
“Although it is a small galaxy, we think it could have had enough energy to blow up an entire galaxy on its own,” Gee said in a separate article. statement.
“The universe directed this movie, and we’re just a film crew,” said Dr. Keith Hawkins of the University of Texas at Austin. “We still don’t know how the story ends.”
7 frames from the 13 billion year old Barbenheimer movie and its sequel Jo931+0038 and our discovery
Image and illustration credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, StSci, University of Chicago, SDSS-V, S5, Melissa Weiss, James Josephides, Yuri Beletsky
Theoretical physicists will no doubt spend a lot of effort modeling the kind of explosion that could cause this combination of elements, but the key to solving the mystery is likely to be finding similar stars. Ideally, we might be able to catch a Babenheimer-type supernova at that moment, but it would help if there were more stars with a composition similar to J0931+0038.
Stars with more than 50 times the mass of the Sun exist today, but they are extremely rare. But they are thought to have been more common in the early universe when Barbenheimer stars formed, so there should be many more stars like J0931+0038 created from their deaths. .
please think about it. Centuries from now, when his two blockbuster films have been forgotten (not to mention their simultaneous release), astronomers will still be able to attribute certain rare objects to the Barbenheimer star without knowing why. It may be called.
This finding and preliminary analysis Astrophysics Journal Letterpreprint on ArXiv.org
