Star

The dramatic end of a starry couple Astrophysics

The dramatic end of a starry couple

The death fight between two stars has been captured in pictures by astronomers with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). The gas cloud, which appears to consist of multiple rings, is the remains of the binary star system HD101584. “A nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant,” explains Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who is the lead author of a study on this object, now published in the journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics. The ALMA image shows vividly what happened during this confrontation, described in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which…
Big baby stars grow the same way as small baby stars Astrophysics

Big baby stars grow the same way as small baby stars

The protostellar object, G353.273+0.641, which is located 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpio, is still a baby. It ignited only around 3000 years ago; astronomically, that is an extremely short amount of time. Nevertheless, G353 is already ten-times heavier than the Sun, and it’s still growing. For the first time, researchers were able to catch a direct glance from above of such a massive protostar and its surroundings using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). In this way, they were able to determine that apparently size doesn’t matter. G353, in any case, acts no different than other…