Artist’s depiction of the binary system MACHO 80.7443.1718.A huge wave is rising on a big star
Melissa Weiss/Center for Astrophysics/Harvard University and Center for Astrophysics Smithsonian Museum
A towering wave more than three times the size of the Sun is crashing into a massive star far away.
The star in question is paired with another star in a highly elliptical orbit. As the stars sway closer together, their gravitational pull on each other creates tsunamis, much like the moon causes tides on Earth. This stretches the star, bulging it near the equator and making it appear brighter for a while.
“Brightness changes like a heartbeat,” he says. Avi Robe At the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Well, Loeb and his colleagues Morgan MacLeodResearchers, also from the Center for Astrophysics, have discovered the most extreme “heartbeat star” ever recorded.
The binary system MACHO 80.7443.1718 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years away from us and was detected in the 1990s. Its star has a mass 34.5 times that of the Sun and a diameter 24 times that of her.
Soon after its discovery, astronomers realized it was a beating star. However, more recent observations have revealed that the change in its brightness is much larger than that of a normal pulse. A typical heartbeat star would have a brightness difference of less than 1% in its orbit. robe. “This particular star has changed by 20%.”
Loeb and MacLeod performed computer simulations of how two stars would interact, and when they reached the nearest part of each other’s orbits, the larger star would rise to a height three times the size of the Sun. Found to cause rising and crashing tsunamis. It returns to the surface of the star in the same way that waves crash against Earth’s oceans.
“It’s amazing how we can understand what’s going on in space by observing the nature around us,” says MacLeod. “I hope the next time people see crashing waves on the beach, they’ll think of this planet.”
“This particular binary just happened to be a companion star coming very close,” says Loeb, explaining why the brightness changes so dramatically.
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