HEAPOW: Heart of Lightness (2022 Feb 14)

[bystander]

HEAPOW: Heart of Lightness (2022 Feb 14)

As a couple of old stars swing around each other, doing Newton's gravitational tango, their warm breath generates intense heat. These stars, the bright red dot at the top of the heart-shaped cloud of gas in the Chandra X-ray Telescope image above, are a binary system called HD 5980 located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way's companion. The couple in HD 5980 are a pair of evolved massive stars with strong stellar winds, and unstable to boot. The light-driven winds which blow off their surfaces meet in between the two and release kinetic energy as heat, raising the temperature in the collision to millions of degrees. This hot gas generates the enormous amounts of X-radiation seen by Chandra. The large glowing heart-shaped X-ray nebula surrounding HD 5980 has a somewhat mysterious origin. It could have been produced a sudden outburst of HD 5980 when the stars were younger and more temperamental. Or it may be the final valentine left behind by the supernova of another hot-headed star in a volatile, three-body encounter.

CXC: NGC 346: A Heart in the Darkness

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Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran

[Ann]

HEAPOW: Heart of Lightness (2022 Feb 14)

As a couple of old stars swing around each other, doing Newton's gravitational tango, their warm breath generates intense heat. These stars, the bright red dot at the top of the heart-shaped cloud of gas in the Chandra X-ray Telescope image above, are a binary system called HD 5980 located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way's companion. The couple in HD 5980 are a pair of evolved massive stars with strong stellar winds, and unstable to boot. The light-driven winds which blow off their surfaces meet in between the two and release kinetic energy as heat, raising the temperature in the collision to millions of degrees. This hot gas generates the enormous amounts of X-radiation seen by Chandra. The large glowing heart-shaped X-ray nebula surrounding HD 5980 has a somewhat mysterious origin. It could have been produced a sudden outburst of HD 5980 when the stars were younger and more temperamental. Or it may be the final valentine left behind by the supernova of another hot-headed star in a volatile, three-body encounter.

CXC: NGC 346: A Heart in the Darkness

Old stars in globular cluster NGC 6397, circa 12 billion years old. There are many age-old red giants here. NASA, ESA, and T. Brown and S. Casertano (STScI). Acknowledgement: NASA, ESA, and J. Anderson (STScI)

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The warm breath of red carbon star LL Pegasi. ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/H. Kim et al.

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An evolved massive star, a red supergiant about to go supernova. Source: Lumen Learning.

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Red giant star Mira leaves a trail of hot gas in its wake. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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Most of what is said in the caption of the Chandra image of HD 5980 suggests that HD 5960 is an old, evolved, red star. As for the age of HD 5980, Wikipedia claims that it is 2.6 million years old, which means that the Sun is some 2,000 times older than HD 5980. And the breath of the components of HD 5980 is probably not "warm", since Wikipedia claims that the temperature of the two main components of this star is some 45,000 K, or some 8 times hotter than the Sun.

HD 5980 is a terrifically luminous, blisteringly hot multiple blue star!

Ann