An artist’s impression of HD 45166, an unusually magnetic star, displaying how intense winds of particles blowing away from the star are trapped by the magnetic discipline
ESO/L. Calcada
A brand new kind of star will be the answer to a cosmic thriller. After a century of examine, astronomers have lastly labored out why a star known as HD 45166 seems so unusual, and it could possibly be the important thing to understanding the place curious stars known as magnetars come from.
HD 45166 is positioned in a binary system about 3000 gentle years away and is a sort of object known as a Wolf-Rayet star, also called a helium star as a result of it has blown away its outer layers of hydrogen to disclose the underlying helium. But it has by no means seemed fairly like every other Wolf-Rayet star we’ve ever seen. “This star was known to be weird for about 100 years,” says Tomer Shenar on the University of Amsterdam within the Netherlands. “It didn’t make any sense – it really contradicted theories, so it deserved more scrutiny.”
Shenar and his colleagues have now made a sequence of recent observations of the star, digging into the spectrum of its gentle to study extra about the way it works. They discovered that it has an awfully highly effective magnetic discipline, stronger than that of every other star of its measurement that has been measured.
The outflows of fabric that make HD 45166 look so unusual are in all probability truly trapped in its magnetic discipline, not flowing away like in regular Wolf-Rayet stars. “What you would see up close is mostly material trapped in arcs going between the poles of the star and colliding in the middle,” says Shenar. “You’d see this thick ball of gas, and sometimes piercing through this you’d see the actual star.”
These highly effective fields imply that when this star collapses in on itself in a number of million years, it’ll most definitely grow to be a magnetar, that are neutron stars with the strongest magnetic fields within the universe. About 10 per cent of neutron stars are magnetars, however how precisely they type has been a thriller for many years. If stars like HD 45166 do finally flip into magnetars, that thriller is lastly solved.
The subsequent step for Shenar and his staff is twofold: by persevering with to look at the binary system for a number of extra years, they’ll get a greater deal with on the star’s properties and therefore its eventual destiny. They additionally plan to seek for extra of those magnetised helium stars – their calculations point out that there ought to be a whole bunch in our galaxy. If they will discover extra at completely different phases of stellar evolution, they might lastly have the ability to nail down how magnetars actually type.
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Source: www.newscientist.com