Astronomers Discover Surprising Stellar Pair in Stunning Cloud

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. New data suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system's fate.

Another piece of the puzzle is the nebula surrounding the stars, known as NGC 6164/6165. It is 7500 years old, hundreds of times younger than both stars. The nebula also shows very high amounts of nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. This is surprising as these elements are normally expected deep inside a star, not outside; it is as if some violent event had set them free.

"The merger scenario was already in my head back in 2017 when I studied nebula observations obtained with the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope," adds co-author Laurent Mahy, currently a senior researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium."Finding an age discrepancy between the stars suggests that this scenario is the most plausible one and it was only possible to show it with the new ESO data.

Astronomers had suspected for some time that massive stars could acquire magnetic fields when two stars merge. But this is the first time researchers find such direct evidence of this happening. In the case of HD 148937, the merger must have happened recently."Magnetism in massive stars isn't expected to last very long compared to the lifetime of the star, so it seems we have observed this rare event very soon after it happened," Frost adds.A. J. Frost, H. Sana, L. Mahy, G.

Astronomers Stellar Pair Cloud Gas Dust Surprise Magnetic Clash Merge Violent Event System

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