Royal Astronomical Society | 2015 Sep 10
A Canadian PhD student has discovered a unique object – two massive stars with magnetic fields in a binary system. Matt Shultz of Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada found the system – Epsilon Lupi – and will publish the new result in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.[attachment=0]hotstar[1].jpg[/attachment]
Around 1/3 of stars in our Galaxy are thought to be in binary systems, where two or more stars orbit around a common centre. They are invaluable for astronomers, as watching how they behave lets astronomers measure their mass and connect this with their brightness – a key way in which we understand how stars evolve.
Mr Shultz is a member of the Binarity and Magnetic Interactions in various classes of Stars - BinaMIcS - consortium led by Dr Evelyne Alecian of the University of Grenoble in France. The collaboration is studying the magnetic properties of close binary stars, and Mr Shultz made the discovery using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Epsilon Lupi is the fourth brightest star system in the southern constellation of Lupus. The pair of stars is about 500 light years away, are both blue in colour, each have between 7 and 8 times the mass of the Sun, and combined together the pair is around 6000 times as luminous as the Sun. Astronomers have known for many years that Epsilon Lupi is a binary system, but had no idea that the two giant stars had magnetic fields. ...
Detection of magnetic fields in both B-type components of the ε Lupi system:
a new constraint on the origin of fossil fields? - M. Shultz, et al, BinaMIcS Collaboration
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1507.05084 > 17 Jul 2015 (v1), 22 Jul 2015 (v2)