Pair Of Stars Surrounded By Hot Salty Steam

in #science4 years ago

The radio-telescope array ALMA did it again. With it, astronomers found a pair of strange young stars at a distance of 9,500 light-years away from us.

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Image by My pictures are CC0. When doing composings: from Pixabay

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) which observes the Universe from the wastelands in Chile did it again. With it, astronomers found a pair of incredible young stars IRAS 16547-4247 which can be found at a distance of 9,500 light-years away from us.

And these are no small stars. The complete mass of the binary stars is about 25 Suns. At the same time, it is surrounded by a large cocoon of interstellar gas with a mass of roughly 10,000 Suns. This cocoon is made from hot steam or sodium chloride – salt.

This itself makes the stars quite interesting because salt isn’t very common in the Universe. It is only the second time we detected this substance near similar young massive stars.

Opposite Rotating Disks

Another thing that interests the astronomers is the fact that the disks of matter that surround the stars rotate in an opposite direction. Normally, the disks of matter rotate the same way as the stars rotate.

The researchers think this could mean that the stars in the stellar system aren’t twins. Possibly, they could’ve been individually born stars they later found each other and created the binary star.

From what we see in the Universe, massive stars almost always have a companion. This is why a young binary stellar system is so interesting to us because studying it and analyzing the data could teach us more about the birth and evolution of binary systems.

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