More than ten thousand Internet users rushed to download the files for 3D printing a violent cosmic phenomenon: the explosive interaction between two giant, strange stars.
A stellar explosion in 1840 created the magnificent Anthropoid Nebula. The video of NASA explains what happens to the stars behind it. (Photo: NASA)
The ζευγάρι violent couple
The three-dimensional model refers to the Trip of the Tropic, a pair of stars that move in orbit around each other at a distance of 7.300 light years from Earth.
Every 5,5 year, the two stars approach a short distance, about the distance of the Sun from Mars. And whenever this happens, the astral couple breaks out with violent flashes.
"It's an eccentric astral monster" said at the American Astronomy Society conference in Seattle, Washington Michael Corcoran of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The two stars, one of which has a mass of 90 times greater than the Sun and the second 30 times larger, emit a constant stream of particles called a stellar wind (as does our own star with the so-called solar wind).
Conflicts
When the two asymmetric giants approach each other as they move in their eccentric trajectories, the wind of the larger star, moving at 420 kilometers per second, collides with the wind of the second star, which blows in the opposite direction with 3 kilometers per second.
In the area where they collide, the two particle streams are heated to a thermowinetens of millions of degrees Celsius. They then emit X-rays, which were recorded by NASA's Swift space telescope during the mismatched pair's final approach.
This allowed the researchers improve computational simulations of Heta Tropida and create XNUMXD models of the turbulent region where opposing stellar winds collide. The files to print them are available for download.
The XNUMXD models printed by the researchers (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
The fingers of gas
The models revealed protrusions like gas fingers, which researchers did not expect to see. "We did not know they existed" he said Thomas Mantura, also a researcher at NASA's Goddard Center.
"We believe that they are structures that result from natural instabilities of the wind from the first star as it collides with a gas wall from the second star", he said.
The Trip of the Torture is still an exciting target for astronomers. But it gave 1840 a much bigger show when it exploded mysteriously and created the impressive Homunculus.
Today, the astral couple is considered a good candidate for a supernova explosion over the next hundreds of thousands of years, researchers say.
Although its distance from Earth is 7.300 light-years, the supernova would be visible even during the day, with a brightness comparable to light of the Moon.