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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Wandering Star Disrupts Stellar Nursery

    June 15, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Event provides new evidence that traveling stars can form binary systems. From a zoomed out, distant view, star-forming cloud L483 appears normal. But when a Northwestern University-led team of astrophysicists zoomed in closer and closer, things became weirder and weirder.

    As the researchers peered closer into the cloud, they noticed that its magnetic field was curiously twisted. And then — as they examined a newborn star within the cloud — they spotted a hidden star, tucked behind it.

    “It’s the star’s sibling, basically,” said Northwestern’s Erin Cox, who led the new study. “We think these stars formed far apart, and one moved closer to the other to form a binary. When the star traveled closer to its sibling, it shifted the dynamics of the cloud to twist its magnetic field.”

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    Simulations reveal Hydrodynamics of Planetary Engulfment by Expanding Star

    June 14, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    engulfed-planet-500.jpg
    In this schematic of planetary engulfment, the image on the left shows a planet inside a giant star, with its orbital decay trajectory as a dashed line. The image on the right shows density and velocity in a simulation of the flow near the planet. (Credit: Ricardo Yarza et al.)

    A new study using hydrodynamical simulations reveals the forces acting on a planet when it is swallowed by an expanding star. The results show that the interactions of a substellar body (a planet or brown dwarf) with the hot gas in the outer envelope of a sun-like star can lead to a range of outcomes depending on the size of the engulfed object and the stage of the star’s evolution...

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    Astronomers may have detected a ‘Dark’ Free-Floating Black Hole

    June 13, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Hubble Space Telescope image of a distant star that was brightened and distorted by an invisible but very compact and heavy object between it and Earth. The compact object — estimated by UC Berkeley astronomers to be between 1.6 and 4.4 times the mass of our sun — could be a free-floating black hole, one of perhaps 200 million in the Milky Way galaxy. (Image courtesy of STScI/NASA/ESA)

    If, as astronomers believe, the deaths of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.

    Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more d...

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    Yoyo Stars responsible for Off-Center Bubbles

    June 10, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Simulated star cluster partially embedded in a cloud of hydrogen gas. (Credit: Michiko Fujii, Takaaki Takeda, 4D2U Project, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

    Astronomers have developed a new code to simulate the formation of a cluster of baby stars. Comparison with the well-known real case of the Orion Nebula shows that its off-center bubble of ionized gas was caused by a massive star that was pushed out of the newborn cluster but is now falling back in.

    Groups of stars often form together in clouds of cold hydrogen gas. The brightest and most massive stars ionize the surrounding gas, making it too hot to form new stars. In this way massive stars act as a feedback, shutting off new star formation...

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