Remnants of a stellar fight form cosmic art – Astronomy Magazine
The colors in this stunning image represent the speed and direction of the system’s gas, ranging from blue (gas moving quickly toward us) to red (gas moving quickly away from us). The stars that were engaged in the fight are located in the bright dot in the center of rings of colorful gas.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Olofsson et al. Acknowledgement: Robert Cumming
A pair of binary stars once engaged in an intense cosmic brawl have left behind a beautiful gas cloud bursting with color, revealing clues about how the fight went down. The battle took place in the HD 101584 system, located thousands of light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, and the aftermath was captured by the 66 radio telescopes that make up the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.
Fortunately, beauty can come from destruction, and that’s definitely the case with this system.
As the system’s aging star puffed up into a red giant, it grew large enough to engulf its lower-mass companion. The smaller star then spiraled toward the core of its giant neighbor. But instead of colliding with it, the interaction caused the larger star to dramatically shed its outer layers, creating the colorful gas cloud you see above.
“Currently, we can describe the death processes common to many Sun-like stars, but we cannot explain why or exactly how they happen,” said co-author Sofia Ramstedt of Sweden’s Uppsala University in a recent press release.
