V Hydrae, or V Hya for short, is a star in the constellation Hydra. According to UCLA astronomer Mark Morris, the fading star has released a series of rising rings that experts estimate are formed every few hundred years. Astronomers have captured a purple giant star in unprecedented detail as it enters its final death throes, displaying an unusual feature. In response to a preprint approved for the journal in the Astrophysical Journal, the star V Hydrae (or V Hya for short) blasted six different rings of dust.
Based on the Tech Explorer report, the process for creating those intriguing “smoke rings” is still unknown. Nevertheless, the statement has the potential to turn the current paradigms for this particular stage of star formation upside down and shed more light on the fate of our own sun.
“V Hydrae has been caught shedding its atmosphere — eventually so much of its mass — which almost all late-stage purple giants do,” said UCLA astronomer Mark Morris.
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“Unfortunately, this is the first and only time that a succession of rising rings around a dying star has been observed — a series of increasing smoke rings,” which we’ve calculated to blow up every few hundred years,” the team said.
Dying star blows out six rings of smoke – pic.twitter.com/w2dk4uFk09
— Fraser Cain (@fcain) March 29, 2022
You are in an unknown system. The system star of the red giant class shines from the left. A light pink planet is close enough to revolve around you
— space traveler (@spacetravelbot) March 30, 2022
#It it is generally assumed that the earth as a planet will not survive the expansion of the sun into a full-fledged red giant star. The sun’s surface is likely to reach Mars’ current orbit — and while Earth’s orbit may also have expanded slightly outward, pic.twitter.com/N34fHMDbwD
— (@mahoor116) March 26, 2022
Red giants are among the highest peaks of several stellar evolutions. When a star’s core finishes converting hydrogen to helium via nuclear fusion, gravity begins to compress it, increasing the star’s internal temperature. This procedure ignites a hydrogen shell that burns around an inert core. The star eventually expands as a result of compression and heating in the core, reaching a diameter between 62 million and 620 million miles (100 million to 1 billion kilometers).
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All this shows that the star is developing unusually fast, which contradicts the conventional hypothesis.
“Our research shows that the standard explanation of how AGB stars die — the massive implosion of fuel by a slow, fairly constant spherical wind for 100,000 years or more — is incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst,” NASA said. astronomer Raghavendra Sahai.
“A near-stellar or substellar partner is likely to play an important role in their deaths,” he added.
The existence of V Hya’s six rings, as well as the relatively high discharges causing the star’s spectacular death, is at least in part due to a combination of a nearby and a potentially distant companion star.