Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Starkiller Base Found!
Organization:365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1134/
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: Starkiller Base Found!
Starkiller Base is the headquarters of the First Order in the 2015 movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. The First Order is the successor to the Galactic Empire of the first 6 movies. The base is not only twice the size of the Death Star, it’s also much more powerful. We see this in the movie when it demolishes five planets at once!
All that power has to come from somewhere, but where could Starkiller Base get that much energy? From the biggest nuclear reactors in the galaxy — stars.
The base is called “Starkiller” because it literally drains the power from stars to charge its cannon. The energy is then released as a deadly blast of radiation.
Thankfully neither the First Order nor Starkiller Base are real, but astronomers have just spotted a real ray gun that is that powerful.
The artist’s picture in today’s album artwork shows the AR Scorpii system in the constellation Scorpius. AR Sco, as it’s called, is a binary or double star system made up of two stars orbiting each other. A red dwarf star is on the left and a white dwarf star’s on the right.
Despite traveling the Universe together, the relationship between the two stars is anything but friendly.
The larger red dwarf does more orbiting of the more massive white dwarf as the barycenter, the center of mass, is closer to the smaller, more massive star.
It’s kind of like a heavyweight wrestler holding hands with a petite little gymnast as they spin around. They both move, but the wrestler moves less, tossing the light gymnast about.
The astronomers calculate that the wrestler, uh, more massive star has 80% of our Sun’s mass and the lighter red dwarf has 30% of the Sun’s mass.
The pair orbit each other every 3.6 hours, while the white dwarf spins on its axis every 3.94 minutes. There are 2 jets of material streaming from the white dwarf, from opposite sides of the star.
As is typical of such jets, they are emitted from the magnetic poles and not from the rotational poles. The magnetic poles where the jets come from, though, are somewhere very close to the white dwarf’s equator.
The astronomers call this a misaligned magnetic dipole.
So these beams of electrons sweep across the cosmos like a gigantic lawn sprinkler!
Quite by chance these beams and the equatorial plane they come from happen be in the orbital plane and hit the red dwarf and cause it to brighten. Since there are 2 beams and each hits the red dwarf, there’s a brightening every 1.97 minutes.
Just like the Star Wars Starkiller Base, the white dwarf accelerates its particles up to almost the speed of light, the fastest speed possible in our Universe, and aims them at its companion star in a deadly beam.
[Lightsaber SFX]
The explosions are so strong that the entire star system appears to glow brightly for a short period.
This pulsing led astronomers for a long time to mistake this unique system for a delta-Scuti type variable star. Variable stars are common and brighten and dim, usually with great regularity. The list of known variable stars has over 46,000 entries for the Milky Way.
Hey, Here’s a Cool Fact!
The astronomers can’t directly detect the white dwarf in this system. The only detections are from the lighter red dwarf.
The spectrum of the red dwarf, though, shows that it’s being pulled around by something heavier than it and a white dwarf most closely fits the evidence.
The system gets 4 times brighter in just 30 seconds as the electron beam sweeps across the face of the red dwarf.
[Lightsaber sound ends.]
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
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!