NASA planet-hunting satellite discovers a dying star 'switching on and off':
Deep within the cosmos, a fading star's quiet death was sharply interrupted. Instead of gracefully vanishing into the heavy darkness of space, as stars typically do, it coughed out a mysterious, prolonged flicker of light.
This "has never been seen in other accreting white dwarfs," Simone Scaringi, an astronomer at Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "It appears to be switching on and off." Scaringi is lead author of a study on the star published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Every iridescent star that decorates our universe -- and those yet to add to the glittering collection -- will one day disappear. Slowly but surely, their luster, fueled by heaps of hydrogen gas, will dwindle as the supply runs out. Entering their final stages of life, they will become white dwarfs.
And NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, caught a unique glimpse of this particular white dwarf's strange behavior. The dying star is part of the two-star system dubbed TW Pictoris, located 1,400 light-years away.
"To see the brightness of TW Pictoris plummet in 30 minutes is, in itself, extraordinary," Scaringi said. His team believes the star unexpectedly lost illumination because of a sudden hurdle in its food-funneling mechanism. Basically, the shiny space ball's fiery snacks were falling out of reach.
[...] "This really is a previously unrecognized phenomenon," Scaringi explained, adding that "because we can draw comparisons with similar behavior in the much smaller neutron stars, it could be an important step in helping us to better understand the process of how other accreting objects feed on the material that surrounds them, and the important role of magnetic fields in this process."
Journal Reference:
Scaringi, S., de Martino, D., Buckley, D. A. H., et al. An accreting white dwarf displaying fast transitional mode switching, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01494-x)
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 19 2021, @12:45PM
The following call to the universal customer service hotline explains the observed behaviour:
Customer: “Our star is failing. It's getting darker.”
Hotline: “Did you try to turn it off and on again?”
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday October 19 2021, @02:46PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @04:46PM
Better proposal here of a magnetic field creating a gate to allow or block the feeding on its host star.
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-astronomers-white-dwarf.html [phys.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 19 2021, @05:20PM (1 child)
Definitions of iridescent:
1. having the property of or exhibiting iridescence (nice, useful definition there)
2. showing luminous colors that seem to change when seen from different angles. (like a soap bubble)
Don't stars have a uniform color based on the type of nuclei they are fuse together? Assuming the fuse doesn't blow.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @03:43AM
No. They have a color based on how hot they are. They all start out fusing hydrogen via the carbon cycle. If they are big enough once the hydrogen runs out they start fusing helium.