Clarissa Pavao, a graduate student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, did her preliminary analysis after examining a mountain of astronomical data. The mentor’s response was quick and in capital letters. “There are orbits!” she wrote it. That’s when Pavao, a senior in space physics, realized she was about to be part of something big – peer-reviewed journal articleNaturedescribing a rare binary star system with unusual features.

in the articleNaturePublished February 1, 2023, and Embry-Riddle Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Dr. It describes a high-power binary star system with X-ray light, co-authored by Noel D. Richardson. stack. Thanks to its strange circular orbit – a quirk among binaries – the twin system appears to have formed when an exploding star or supernova exploded, without the usual explosion of a failed firework.

The binary system’s circular orbit was an important clue that helped the researchers identify the second star in the binary as an extinct or “extremely intermittent” supernova. Usually, after a star has exhausted all its nuclear fuel, its core collapses before exploding into space as a supernova. In this case, Richardson said, “The star was so extinct that the explosion didn’t even have enough energy to push the orbit into the more typical elliptical shape seen in similar binaries.”

We are Stardust

The name of the binary system sounds like a plate: CPD-29 2176. Researchers currently estimate that there are only about 10 such star systems in the Galaxy. By studying it, they unravel new clues to our earliest beginnings, such as stardust.

“When we look at these objects, we’re looking back in time,” Pavao said. “We will learn more about the origin of the universe that will tell us where our solar system is headed. As humans, we started with the same elements as these stars.”

Richardson added that without binary systems like the CPD-29 2176, life on Earth would be very different. “It is likely that such systems will eventually evolve into binary neutron stars that combine and form the heavy elements that are ejected into the universe,” he said. “These heavy elements allow us to live the way we do. For example, most of the gold was produced by stars such as remnant supernovae or neutron stars in the binary system we studied. Astronomy deepens our understanding of the earth and our place on Earth.”

Persistence pays off

The project began when Pavao entered Richardson’s office in hopes of gaining research experience. “I said, ‘Please do me some research.’ He had data from a bright star known as a Be-type star with the 1.5-metre telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. It was located in the same sky as the other star that caused the explosion, which – perhaps something called a “soft gamma ray burst” – caught the attention of astronomers, prompting Richardson and others to question the telescope’s data.

Pavao built the Be star’s spectrum, but it needed to clear the data first to make it less noisy. “The telescope looks at the star and takes in all the light so you can see the elements that make up the star,” he said, “but Be stars often have disks of matter around them. It’s hard to see them all directly.”

Persistence paid off: Pavao was able to learn more about data processing and computer coding to be able to analyze the stellar spectrum. He and Richardson found a simple line originating from the star that is unaffected by the surrounding disk. He thought his chart was a scatterplot. Richardson thought otherwise and asked for his all-caps email. After quickly entering Pavao’s data into a special computer program, he realized that they had found the orbit of the star, but different from what had been expected. Further analysis of the data revealed that one star does indeed orbit another approximately every 60 days. Pavao remembers Richardson saying, “It’s not just a binary system.” Source