This Spinning, Snakelike Star System Might Blast Gamma Rays into the Milky Way When It Dies
For the first time, astronomers have found a star system in our galaxy that could produce a gamma-ray burst — one of the brightest and most energetic events known to occur in the universe.
The star system is officially called 2XMM J160050.7–514245, but the researchers nicknamed it "Apep" after the Egyptian snake-deity of chaos. The name works nicely for the system, which is surrounded by long, fiery pinwheels of matter cast out into space, as shown in the above image from the Very Large Telescope.
Those pinwheels come from a pair of tightly orbiting binary "Wolf-Rayet" stars at the system's center. (They're close enough to one another that they look like a single bright light below the system's third, dimmer and more distantly orbiting star, also shown in the image.)
Wolf-Rayet stars are ultramassive suns that have reached the ends of their lives and burned up all their hydrogen. They thus fuse heavier elements, spinning rapidly and tossing material into space. They're bright enough that astronomers can detect their presence even when they reside in other galaxies. And when their cores collapse, triggering supernovas, astronomers believe they may create the long gamma-ray bursts sometimes detected incoming from deep space, the researchers said.
The Wolf-Rayet stars must be rotating extraordinarily fast to fling off all that matter — nearly fast enough to tear themselves apart, the study said. It's unclear precisely what causes stars of this kind to spin so fast, but that speed will play a key role in producing a gamma-ray burst when the supernova eventually comes, the researchers said.
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