New research shows that extremely bright, strangely behaving stars surrounded by huge disks of hot gas can form when they suck life from a second star in their star system with the help of a third, hidden star.
It was previously thought that such stars stole mass from nearby stars in a binary star system. But they can actually occur in triple star systems, where the third star pushes the victim towards the vampire star, Newsweek writes, referring to the results of a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
These Be stars are a subspecies of B stars that are 3 to 20 times more massive than our Sun, which is a G-class star. The stars are classified based on their spectral properties, or the colors of the light they emit, which a in turn are based mainly on their combustion temperature. B stars are generally bluish in color and have temperatures between 9,500 and 29,500 degrees Celsius.
“Be stars differ from B stars in that they are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust. Their disks form because Be stars rotate very quickly, and this causes matter to be ejected from the star’s surface,” explained astrophysicist Jonathan Dodd.
Be stars were first discovered more than a hundred years ago, but how they formed remains a mystery. Scientists now hypothesize that Be stars form by sucking life from their neighbor, but that neighbor could be a star in the triple system, a third closer to Be.
The researchers noted that Be stars appear to have fewer companions than B stars, but concluded that this was because the companion was already virtually engulfed and was too faint to be seen. Looking at the data set of the most distant stars, they saw that the Be and B stars appeared to have the same number of companions, meaning that the Be stars had two neighbors: one that gets sucked in and a third that pushes the other star closest to its own. destiny. .
Scientists hope the discovery will help unravel other cosmic mysteries, improving our understanding of how the universe works.
“In addition to our understanding of Be stars, these findings could have implications for our understanding of things like black holes, neutron stars and gravitational wave sources, as they could be precursors to these objects,” Dodd said.
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2023-11-27 13:40:47
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