Podcaster: Richard Drumm

Title: Space Scoop: The Curious Case of the Spinning Star

Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy

Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1610/

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: The Curious Case of the Spinning Star

Like a team of detectives, a group of astronomers are trying to solve a mystery.

In 2011 astronomers found a weird star called VFTS 102 that is about 25 times more massive than our Sun and is spinning more than 300 times faster.

It’s located in the 30 Doradus nebula, also called the Tarantula Nebula, of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. It’s visible from Earth’s southern hemisphere.

It’s spinning so fast in fact that it’s very close to the point at which it would be torn apart due to centrifugal forces. It spins faster than any other heavyweight star that we know of!

In fact, material from the star’s equator is probably flung outward into a disk of material surrounding the star.

The arrow in the photo in today’s album artwork points to the star. There are a lot of stars there, it’s the one right at the tip of the arrow.

And while VFTS 102 is spinning incredibly quickly, it’s also moving in an odd way, traveling through space a bit slower than other nearby stars.

To try to understand why it’s spinning and moving differently from other stars, astronomers have come up with a theory to explain what might have happened.

The star could have originally been part of a binary pair of stars when it was younger.

If the two stars were very close together, the star could have been made to spin more quickly by gaining some extra material from its companion.

It effectively would have stolen some of the orbital energy of the companion and turned it into its own rotational energy.

However, the fast-spinning star no longer has a companion.

So what happened to the other star?

Astronomers think that the companion star exploded as a supernova. In fact, VFTS 102 is 12 parsecs away from an X-ray pulsar, PSR J0537-691.

This pulsar and 102 are moving away from each other, strongly suggesting (but not proving) that they were associated in the past.

The power of the supernova explosion would have then pushed the fast-spinning star away from its companion.

This would explain why the star is different compared to other nearby stars – traveling a little more slowly through space – because it’s a newcomer to the region.

Using spectra of the stars in the nebula and the Doppler effect, the astronomers were able to determine the radial velocities of the stars, that is, the velocity toward or away from us here on Earth.

VFTS 102 is moving at roughly 228 kilometers per second in this radial direction, which is slower than other similar stars in the region by about 40 kilometers per second. This suggests that 102 has a different origin from the other stars in the cluster.

Hey Here’s a Cool Fact:
An airplane traveling at the speed that this massive star’s equator is spinning would only take about one minute to circle the Earth! That’s about 2 million kilometers an hour.

Thank you for listening to 365 Days of Astronomy!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. Audio post-production by Richard Drumm. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.  This year we will celebrate more discoveries and stories from the universe. Join us and share your story. Until tomorrow! Goodbye!