This story was updated at 1:02 p.m. EDT.
Astronomers
have caught their sharpest look of a double star system deep in the heart of
the Orion nebula.
The result
is an ultra-clear glimpse of Theta 1 Orionis C, a mismatched pair of stars locked
in orbit around one another about 1,350 light-years from Earth.
Once
thought to be a single star, Theta 1 Orionis C is the brightest and most
dominant stellar system inside the dense star-forming region of Orion's beautiful
Trapezium Cluster. Infrared views of the system ultimately showed its dual
nature, which shines through with renewed clarity in the new image.
Researchers
used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer
(VLTI), which combines data from multiple telescopes into one image, to make
the new observation.
The
Chile-based observatory yielded a photograph with a resolution of about 2
milliarcseconds. That's about the equivalent of how a car on the moon would
look to a human staring at it from the surface of the Earth, or the view from a
hypothetical space telescope with a 426-foot (130-meter) main mirror. For
comparison, the main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope is
about 7.8 feet (2.4 meters) wide.
"Our
observations demonstrate the fascinating new imaging capabilities of the VLTI,"
said study co-investigator Gerd Weigelt of the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio
Astronomy. "This infrared interferometry technique will certainly lead to many
fundamental new discoveries."
In addition
to the new image of Theta 1 Orionis C, Weigelt and colleague Stefan Kraus found
that the stars orbit each other once every 11 years. The smaller of the pair is
about nine times as massive as the sun, while its larger partner weighs in at whopping
38 solar masses.
Solar wind
from the paired stars shapes the disks of protoplanetary dust of other nearby
stars, researchers said. The new images and data will help astronomers better
understand how
massive stars form within the Orion nebula, they added.
The
research, announced today, is detailed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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