red giant star tagged posts

High angular resolution images of CW Leo spanning more than eight years. Credit: Paul Stewart and Peter Tuthill, University of Sydney.

It is the brightest infrared star in the Northern sky, but a student has found that astronomers have been mistakenly interpreting the dust in the environment of a famous star that lies 450 light years from Earth. The star CW Leo aka IRC+10216, would be the second brightest star in the sky if our eyes could see infrared light. Images of its circumstellar environment released today reveal substantial evolution occurring over a span of more than 8 years, with none of the previously identified bright spots in fact containing the star, which is now believed to be buried in its own dust.

Graduate student Paul Stewart has reconstructed images from 2000 to 2008 – w...

Artistic representation (not to scale) of a red giant star with strong internal magnetic fields. Waves propagating through the star become trapped within the stellar core when a strong magnetic field is present, producing a “magnetic greenhouse effect” that reduces the observed amplitude of stellar pulsations. Credit: Rafael A. García (SAp CEA), Kyle Augustson (HAO), Jim Fuller (Caltech) & Gabriel Pérez (SMM, IAC), Photograph from AIA/SDO

Using asteroseismology, which uses sound waves generated by turbulence on the surface of stars to determine their inner properties scientists found the fusion-powered cores of red giants, stars that are evolved versions of our sun, are strongly magnetized. The findings will help astronomers better understand the evolution of stars.

“In the same way medi...