A Sun-like baby star blowing a bubble of hot gas called an “astrosphere” has been captured for the first time by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanne Brner
X-rays: NASA/CXC/John Hopkins Univ./CM Lisse et al. ; Infrared: NASA/ESA/STIS; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolf
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Earth and the rest of the planets in the solar system live inside the heliospherea protective bubble inflated by the winds of our sun. Other stars also have such bubbles, which astronomers call astrospheres.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured a very young sun-like star bursting its bubble about 120 light years away. Called HD 61005, this star has about the same mass and temperature as the sun, but is only 100 million years old – our original star is about five billion years old.
Because HD 61005 is still in its infancy, it produces a strong solar wind, strengthening its bubble. Currently, the star’s astrosphere has a diameter equivalent to approximately 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, i.e. a diameter smaller than that of the star. the heliosphere.
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“We’ve been studying our Sun’s astrosphere for decades, but we can’t see it from the outside,” said astronomer Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University. in a statement. “This new result from Chandra on the astrosphere of a similar star tells us about the shape of the Sun and how it has changed over billions of years as the Sun evolves and moves through the galaxy.”
HD 61005 is surrounded by a lot of dense dust, which is a remnant of the star’s formation. The star produces X-rays when its stellar wind hits the colder interstellar medium surrounding the star. The sun may have gone through a similar stage of development in its early days, researchers say.
The observations were described in an article published on the preprint server arXiv.org and accepted for publication in the Astrophysics Journal.
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