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A New Class of X-ray Star?
| Title |
A New Class of X-ray Star? |
| General Information |
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. Teaming up space telescopes to make simultaneous ultraviolet and X-ray observations, astronomers may have solved a 20-year-old mystery and possibly discovered a new class of X-ray star. The unlikely suspect is a second-magnitude star 600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. It turns out that the mild-mannered-looking star is ejecting 100-million-degree flares into space ? 10 times hotter than typical flares ejected from our Sun. The findings are based on observations by the Hubble telescope and the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. Read more: * Release Text [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/07/text/ ] |
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In the Center of the Keyhole
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| Title |
In the Center of the Keyhole Nebula |
| Explanation |
Stars, like people, do not always go gentle into that good night [ http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/~flowers/Thomas.htm ]. The above Keyhole Nebula [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960404.html ] results from dying star Eta Carinae [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap970712.html ]'s violently casting off dust [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap961119.html ] and gas during its final centuries. Eta Carinae [ http://www.seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/etacar.html ] is many times more massive than our own Sun [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960916.html ], and should eventually undergo a tremendous supernova [ http://www.gnacademy.org:8001/uu-gna/text/astro/stars/supernova.html ] explosion. Eta Carinae emits much light in colors outside the human visible range. This past week, X-ray [ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/lib/glossary.html#X-ray ] emission from Eta Carinae was verified by the orbiting Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer [ http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xte/XTE.html ] to be periodic, peaking every 85.1 days [ http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/users/corcoran/eta_car/eta_car_xte.html ]. This, along with a previously hypothesized 5.52 year period [ http://www1.elsevier.nl/journals/newast/jnl/articles/S1384107697000080/ ], indicates that the dying star might be part of a multiple star system. |
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