Astronomers have captured a brilliantly colored image of a heated battle between two stars.A large star and its much smaller companion are circling each other at the center of the HD101584 binary star system.The researchers used the ALMA radio telescope array, along with data from the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment, to image the nebula.Two stars in a distant binary system are locked in a heated battle, and astronomers were able to spy on them thanks to the gaseous clouds created from their cosmic scuffle. Zooming in on the location of the HD101584 binary star system.“The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this ‘death process’ was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant,” said astrophysicist Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Olofsson and his colleagues published their work last year in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.Related StoriesLIGO Catches Two Neutron Stars Battling It OutAstronomers Discover Bizarre Quadruple Star SystemProfessor Predicts Two Stars Will CollideNearing the end of its life, the larger star—located thousands of light years away in the Centaurus constellation—swelled into a red, hot giant and threatened to engulf its smaller partner star. But as that small star circled closer and and closer to the red giant star’s core, instead of being swallowed up, it sparked a massive stellar explosion. The larger star shot layers of gas out into space, leaving its bright, dense core exposed. Only recently have the images been released. The team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to spy on the stars and analyzed data from the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) in order to process the remarkable shots of the colorful nebula. Our own star will eventually die in a similar way before turning into a white dwarf. Learning the many ways that these types of stellar leftovers form can help us unravel mysteries about the future of our own solar system.View full post on YoutubeJennifer LemanJennifer Leman is a science journalist and news editor at Popular Mechanics, where she writes and edits stories about science and space. A graduate of the Science Communication Program at UC Santa Cruz, her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Science News and Nature. Her favorite stories illuminate Earth’s many wonders and hazards.
