NASA | JPL-Caltech | Spitzer | WISE | 2016 July 27
[img3="An unusual celestial object called CX330 was first detected as a source of X-ray light in 2009. It has been launching "jets" of material into the gas and dust around it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"]http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA20700.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Alone on the cosmic road, far from any known celestial object, a young, independent star is going through a tremendous growth spurt.
The unusual object, called CX330, was first detected as a source of X-ray light in 2009 by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory while it was surveying the bulge in the central region of the Milky Way. Further observations indicated that this object was emitting optical light as well. With only these clues, scientists had no idea what this object was.
But when Chris Britt, postdoctoral researcher at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and colleagues were examining infrared images of the same area taken with NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), they realized this object has a lot of warm dust around it, which must have been heated by an outburst.
Comparing WISE data from 2010 with Spitzer Space Telescope data from 2007, researchers determined that CX330 is likely a young star that had been outbursting for several years. In fact, in that three-year period its brightness had increased by a few hundred times. ...
The lone star's behavior has similarities to FU Orionis, a young outbursting star that had an initial three-month outburst in 1936-7. But CX330 is more compact, hotter and likely more massive than the FU Orionis-like objects known. The more isolated star launches faster "jets," or outflows of material that slam into the gas and dust around it. ...
Discovery of a Long-Lived, High Amplitude Dusty Infrared Transient - C.T. Britt et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 460(3):2822 (2016 Aug 11) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1182
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1605.05321 > 17 May 2016