Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Sibling Stars in a Crushing Hug
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1544/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is:
Sibling Stars in a Crushing Hug
When we look up at the night sky, we see the stars as tiny points of light. But did you know that half of these points of light are not one star, but two or more circling around each other!
It’s very common for stars to form with siblings, we call them binary stars, but the stars shown in the artist’s representation in today’s album artwork are the hottest and most massive pair ever spotted so close together.
It’s called VFTS 352, and is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that’s orbiting our Milky Way, which is visible from the Southern Hemisphere. The real thing can be seen in the background image with all the stars. It’s the tiny dot of light with red tick-marks marking the spot.
Usually, sibling stars are quite far apart taking months, years or even centuries to circle around each other. But the two stars in the picture orbit each other in little more than a day. It takes us a whole year to orbit the Sun.
The stars are so close that their surfaces overlap and a bridge has formed between them. They look somewhat like a peanut, having 2 lobes.
These stars are also unusually large and hot. When combined, their mass is almost 60 times the Sun’s mass and they are each more than 40,000 degrees Celsius! Our Sun’s surface is just 6,000 degrees C!
We don’t often see a pairing like this because it doesn’t last very long. Very long on cosmic time scales, that is… It’s hard to catch them in the act, they’re rare.
Before long (on those cosmic time scales) these stars will face a catastrophic end in one of two possible ways. The two stars could merge into one rapidly spinning giant star, which could then lead to a huge supernova-type explosion called a long-duration gamma-ray burst.
The two stars, however, might also avoid merging and would then, go supernova separately, which, because of the large mass of the 2 stars, would form 2 black holes.
These black holes would be orbiting each other closely and intensely generating Professor Einstein’s hypothesized gravity waves.
Hey, Here’s a Cool Fact:
So far, all gamma ray bursts or GRBs we’ve spotted have taken place waaaay outside our Galaxy and have been harmless to Earth. They are somewhat rare. Only a few of them are expected to form in our galaxy over a time span of a million years.
A GRB can put out in a few seconds as much energy as our Sun will generate over it’s entire lifetime of 10 billion years. This energy is confined to 2 narrow beams aligned with the axis of rotation of the star.
These awe inspiring explosions will have a program all their own, so keep your podcast software pointed here!
Thank you for listening to 365 Days of Astronomy!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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