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A stellar odd couple 700 light-years away is creating a chaotically beautiful display of colourful, gaseous filaments. The Hubble captured the pair, named R Aquarii, and their symbiotic interactions. Every 44 years the system’s violent eruptions blast out filaments of gas at over 1.6 million kilometers per hour. R Aquarii consists of two dramatically different types of stars: a white dwarf and a particular type of variable star. The white dwarf is a stellar remnant. It’s what remains of a main sequence star that’s reached the end of its life of fusion. It shines only because of its remnant heat. White dwarfs are extremely dense, so even though they’re about the same size as Earth, they have a mass similar to the Sun. That means for such a small volume object, they exert a powerful gravitational pull. The variable star is a type of red giant called a Mira-type variable. It’s a complete opposite to its companion star. Rather than extremely compact and dense, the red giant is bloated and red. It’s more than 400 times larger than the Sun. It’s a pulsating giant star that’s more at home atop Sauron’s Dark Tower than it is in a catalogue of stars. As it pulses, it changes temperature and luminosity. Over an approximately 390-day period, its brightness changes by a factor of 750. That means that when the star is at its peak brightness, it’s more than 5,000 times as bright as our Sun. This image of R Aquarii is from the SPHERE planet-hunting instrument on the ESO’s Very Large telescope in 2018. It was captured while the instrument was being tested, and astronomers were able to capture dramatic details of the turbulent stellar relationship with unprecedented clarity. This image is from the SPHERE/ZIMPOL observations of R Aquarii, and shows the binary star itself, as well as the jets of material spewing from the stellar couple. Image Credit: By ESO/Schmid et al. – https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1840a/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75014181 The powerful pulsing of this massive red star is enough to be a spectacle in itself. But it’s relationship with its binary partner creates an even more spectacular display. As the two orbit, the dense white dwarf draws hydrogen gas away from the red giant. The hydrogen accumulates on the white dwarf until the star can’t take it anymore. Then the hydrogen explodes in nuclear fusion on the surface of the small, dense star. The nova explosion ejects the material into space in gaseous filaments. But the region around white dwarfs is dominated by the star’s powerful magnetic fields, which can be millions of times stronger than Earth’s. The force of the nuclear explosion and the magnetic fields twist the gaseous hydrogen filaments into trails and streamers, and eventually, they loop back on themselves and form spiral patterns. We can only see this nebula of gaseous filaments because the radiation from both stars strips electrons from the hydrogen, turning it into ionized gas. The ionized hydrogen glows brightly and creates a beautiful natural display. The central binary star’s brightness changes over time because of the pulsing of the red giant. The gas appears red to us, but not because of the red giant. R Aquarii is in a dusty region, and the dust absorbs all the blue light, with only red reaching us. A Hubble timelapse consisting of five images of R Aquarii from 2014 to 2023 helps bring the dynamic interplay to life. Looking at these images, it’s easy to misunderstand the scale of the stars, the nebula, and the brightly-lit, filaments of ionized hydrogen. However, the material blasted into space reaches as far as 400 billion kilometers (248 billion miles). For comparison, that’s about 24 times greater than our Solar System’s diameter. R Aquarii was first observed by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding in 1810, when he was a colleague of Carl Friedrich Gauss at Gottingen Observatory. It’s one of the nearest symbiotic stars, and is an object that astronomers are very interested in observing. In the 20th century, Edwin Hubble and others studied it and recognized its complex interactions and the resulting nebula. R Aquarii and its brethren can teach astronomers a lot about stellar winds, accretion, and ionized nebula. The post It Takes Very Special Conditions to Create This Bizarre Stellar Spectacle appeared first on Universe Today.

Ever since William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, astronomers have been eager to find new planets on the outer edge of the solar system. But after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, we’ve found no other large planets. Sure, we discovered Pluto and other dwarf planets beyond it, but nothing Earth-sized or larger. If there is some planet nine, or “Planet X” lurking out there, we have yet to find it. But there is some tentative evidence for it. As we have found more Pluto-like bodies known as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) and even more distant bodies known as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), we’ve noticed that there appears to be an odd bit of orbital clustering among them. The orientation of their orbits isn’t as randomly distributed as we’d expect, which could be caused by the small gravitational tugs of a super-Earth at the edge of the solar system. If we assume that is the solution to the orbital bias, then there could be a five Earth-mass planet orbiting ten times farther from the Sun than Neptune. Astronomers have searched for the planet but have found nothing. This has led some to speculate that Planet X might be a primordial black hole, while more skeptical minds argue it must not exist. The evidence just isn’t that strong, and there are other possible explanations for the clustering. So a new paper argues for a new way to gather evidence of Planet X, and it’s remarkably clever. The idea is based on a phenomenon known as occultation. This is when an asteroid or planetary body passes in front of a star. By observing the star as the object occults it, astronomers can measure things such as the orbit and shape of the body. Through an occultation, we discovered that the asteroid Chariklo has a ring system. Amateur astronomers have used occultation events to map the shapes of small asteroids. Ocultations different vantage points reveals the shape of an asteroid. Credit: IOTA The authors propose building 200 40-cm telescopes spaced 5 kilometers apart to create an occultation array 1,000 km wide. Since each telescope would have a slightly different vantage point, occultations would be seen differently by different telescopes, allowing astronomers to map the orbit and size of Trans-Neptunian Objects. They estimate that over the course of a 10-year study they could detect about 1,800 new TNOs. Based on simulations of TNO orbits and clustering, the authors show that such a system should find clear evidence of any 5 Earth-mass body within 800 AU of the Sun. In other words, if Planet X is out there, this study could prove it. The whole array would only cost about $15 million U.S. dollars, which is surprisingly cheap for such a project. Even if the study failed to find Planet X, it would add to our understanding of the distant solar system and also allow us to study how [sunlight can shift the orbits of small solar system bodies.](https://briankoberlein.com/blog/super-breakout/) Reference: Gomes, Daniel CH, and Gary M. Bernstein. “An automated occultation network for gravitational mapping of the trans-neptunian solar system.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.16348 (2024). The post The Best Way to Find Planet Nine Might Be Hundreds of Tiny Telescopes appeared first on Universe Today.

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Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and President Vladimir Putin of Russia spoke by phone for an hour Friday, marking the first communication between the two heads of state in two years. Scholz protested the involvement of North Korean troops in the war in Ukraine and called upon Putin to end the conflict, stating that Russia had not achieved its goals since its invasion close to three years ago. Putin responded that any peace deal in Ukraine must include Ukrainian neutrality and recognize “new territorial realities”—an indication that Russia is unlikely to consider a settlement that does not include control over land currently occupied by its military. In turn, Scholz informed Putin that Germany would continue to provide aid to Ukraine to resist what it considers to be an unacceptable invasion. The call comes at a difficult time for Chancellor Scholz, who is faced with a collapsing government and widespread popular dissatisfaction, including the surging Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now the second-most popular party in the country behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union. The right-wing populist party has been critical of aid to Ukraine, and may complicate German efforts to support the nation if new elections are called soon. The post Scholz, Putin Discuss Ukraine War appeared first on The American Conservative.