Doomed Huge Star Only 8000 Light Years Away Will Explode In Supernova

MessageToEagle.com – An international team of researchers, have found a star system (nicknamed  Apep  after the serpentine Egyptian god of chaos ), which is the first known candidate in the Milky Way to produce a dangerous gamma-ray burst, among the most energetic events in the universe, when it explodes in supernova and dies.

The two hot, luminous stars – known to astronomers as Wolf-Rayets – orbit each other every hundred years or so, according to the research conducted at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.

Wolf-Rayet stars, like those driving Apep’s plume, are known to be very massive stars at the ends of their lives; they could explode as supernovae at any time.

This orbital dance is embossed on a fast wind streaming off the stars. Using spectroscopy, the astronomers have measured the velocity of the stellar winds as fast as 12 million kilometers an hour, about 1 percent the speed of light.

“We discovered this star as an outlier in a survey with a radio telescope operated by the University of Sydney, Dr Joe Callingham, lead author of the study, said, in a press release.

“We knew immediately we had found something quite exceptional: the luminosity across the spectrum from the radio to the infrared was off the charts.

That sculpted plume is what makes the system so important, said Professor Peter Tuthill, research group leader at the University of Sydney.

“The curved tail is formed by the orbiting binary stars at the centre, which inject dust into the expanding wind creating a pattern like a rotating lawn sprinkler. Because the wind expands so much, it inflates the tiny coils of dust revealing the physics of the stars at the heart of the system.”

However, the data on the plume presented a conundrum: the stellar winds were expanding 10 times faster than the dust.

“It was just astonishing,” Professor Tuthill said. “It was like finding a feather caught in a hurricane just drifting along at walking pace.”

“The rapid rotation puts Apep into a whole new class. Normal supernovae are already extreme events but adding rotation to the mix can really throw gasoline on the fire.”

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