genius known as aristocratical stragglers have pretty much discovered the cosmic equivalent of the fountain of youthfulness – they should be old and virtually out of fuel , yet they continue to cauterise red-hot and bright blue like a vernal superstar .
Figuring out just what create these dreary stragglers tick has long cross astronomers , but now investigator at Northwestern and the University of Wisconsin think they have the answer . It ’s all about a process known as hatful transferee , which is a nicely scientific way of describing what these drab straggler are really all about – they slip huge amount of flock from a gargantuan companion star , which gives them the extra fuel they need to keep burn longer . Their poor fellow traveller is in the end stripped bare , leaving nothing behind but a white dwarf effect .
The researchers hit upon this explanation when they agnize that the huge , vast majority of blue stragglers are in binary star systems . That stand for they have a ready supply of extra fuel just hold back to be gobbled up . The fact that most of the bluish stragglers ’ companions are now blank dwarf serves as collateral evidence – they ’re the desiccated cadaver of once elephantine sensation that lost their mass to the gentle stragglers .
northwesterly astronomer Aaron M. Geller explains :
“ It ’s really the companion star that helped us mold where the low strayer comes from . The fellow stars orbit at periods of about 1,000 days , and we have evidence that the fellow traveler are white dwarfs . Both point straight to an origin from mass transfer . We think we have a undecomposed sympathy of stellar evolution , but it does n’t predict blue stragglers . People have been try out to explain the stock of blue stragglers since their discovery in 1953 , and now we have the detailed observations take to identify how they were created . I ’ve always enjoy trying to get to the bottom of a secret . ”
ViaNature . Illustration by Aaron M. Geller .
AstronomyScienceSpace
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