ScienceNews: Fast-moving star is a really big loser

[bystander]

Fast-moving star is a really big loser
Science News - 07 May 2010

Which means the cosmic bullies that sent 30 Doradus 016 reeling must be even bigger

In stellar terms, weighing as much as 90 suns ought to get you some respect.

But the star 30 Doradus 016 was born in a particularly rough neighborhood. New research presented May 3 and in an upcoming journal article suggests it was unceremoniously kicked out of its native home by two even bigger bullies. And an unpublished study of the core of the same star-forming region, located in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud, concludes that there may be really huge stars, some tipping the scales at twice the mass previously thought possible in today’s universe, lurking in nearby reaches of the cosmos.

A massive runaway star from 30 Doradus

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1004.5402 > 29 Apr 2010

[bystander]

Hubble Catches Heavyweight Runaway Star Speeding from 30 Doradus
Hubble Site STScI-2010-14 - 11 May 2010

A blue-hot star, 90 times more massive than our Sun, is hurtling across space fast enough to make a round trip from Earth to the Moon in merely two hours. Though the speed is not a record-breaker, it is unique to find a homeless star that has traveled so far from its nest. The only way the star could have been ejected from the star cluster where it was born is through a tussle with a rogue star that entered the binary system where the star lived, which ejected the star through a dynamical game of stellar pinball. This is strong circumstantial evidence for stars as massive as 150 times our Sun's mass living in the cluster. Only a very massive star would have the gravitational energy to eject something weighing 90 solar masses. The runaway star is on the outskirts of the 30 Doradus nebula, a raucous stellar breeding ground in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. The finding bolsters evidence that the most massive stars in the local universe reside in 30 Doradus, making it a unique laboratory for studying heavyweight stars. 30 Doradus, also called the Tarantula Nebula, is roughly 170,000 light-years from Earth.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 092402.htm

[wonderboy]

Its things like this that can cause gravitational disturbances in large interstellar objects causing them to hurtle towards our planet. The chances of it happening are as slim as kate moss but even still.

Its also good proof that our solar system probably went through similar processes during its creation with such stars as jupiter and saturn roaming amongs it.


Paul.

[bystander]

Shockwave reveals star's birthplace
Nature - 09 June 2010

Astronomers spy the trail carved through interstellar gas by a massive runaway.

They are more than a 100 times the mass of the Sun, glow more than 10 million times as brightly, and, over the course of their lives, spew out more than half their mass in the form of a relentless stellar wind. Yet the origin of the young massive stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy has been a mystery for astronomers for decades.

Vasilii Gvaramadze, an astronomer at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute at Moscow State University, and his colleagues have now located the birthplace of one of the group, and have shown that it is a 'runaway star', bolting across the LMC at more than 130 kilometres per second after being ejected from its home cluster. The discovery implies that other young massive stars in the LMC might also be runaways, and casts light on the violent processes that can cause giant stars to be ejected from the stellar clusters in which they first form. A paper on the findings has been accepted for publication by Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available on the arXiv preprint database.

Massive runaway stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1006.0225 > 01 June 2010

(NASA/ESA/C. Evans (Royal Observatory Edinburgh)/N. Walborn (STScI)/ESO)
Hubble catches heavyweight runaway star speeding from 30 Doradus
ESA Hubble (heic1008) 11 May 2010

A heavy runaway star rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 400 000 kilometres per hour, a speed that would get you to the Moon and back in two hours. The runaway is the most extreme case of a very massive star that has been kicked out of its home by a group of even heftier siblings. Tantalising clues from three observatories, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and some old-fashioned detective work, suggest that the star may have travelled about 375 light-years from its suspected home, a giant star cluster called R136.

The homeless star is on the outskirts of the 30 Doradus Nebula, a raucous stellar breeding ground in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. The finding bolsters evidence that the most massive stars in the local Universe reside in 30 Doradus, making it a unique laboratory for studying heavyweight stars. 30 Doradus, also called the Tarantula Nebula, is roughly 170 000 light-years from Earth. Nestled in the core of 30 Doradus, R136 contains several stars topping 100 solar masses each.

The observations offer insights into how massive star clusters behave.

[laura_abc]

I found this beautiful site, there are lot of PICs about ESA/Hubble:
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=19334

[Ann]

Hello, Laura, and welcome to the Starship Asterisk*!

There are lots of things to see here, and there are many fantastic and lovely things to read about in other forums, too. Amazing things are happening in the world of astronomy, because we live in such an amazing universe!

Some of us mainstays in this forum may be a bit jaded. We may react by saying, "Yeah, yeah, been there, done that, heard that already".

But don't give up! Stick with us here! We need people who bring fresh enthusiasm!

So you are very welcome here!

Ann