NuSTAR: Superstar Eta Carinae Shoots Cosmic Rays

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bystander
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NuSTAR: Superstar Eta Carinae Shoots Cosmic Rays

Post by bystander » Tue Jul 03, 2018 8:12 pm

NuSTAR Proves Superstar Eta Carinae Shoots Cosmic Rays
NASA | GSFC | NuSTAR | 2018 Jul 03
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A new study using data from NASA’s NuSTAR space telescope suggests that Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years, is accelerating particles to high energies — some of which may reach Earth as cosmic rays.

“We know the blast waves of exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles to speeds comparable to that of light, an incredible energy boost,” said Kenji Hamaguchi, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of the study. “Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our analysis indicates Eta Carinae is one of them.”

Astronomers know that cosmic rays with energies greater than 1 billion electron volts (eV) come to us from beyond our solar system. But because these particles — electrons, protons and atomic nuclei — all carry an electrical charge, they veer off course whenever they encounter magnetic fields. This scrambles their paths and masks their origins.

Eta Carinae, located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, is famous for a 19th century outburst that briefly made it the second-brightest star in the sky. This event also ejected a massive hourglass-shaped nebula, but the cause of the eruption remains poorly understood.

The system contains a pair of massive stars whose eccentric orbits bring them unusually close every 5.5 years. The stars contain 90 and 30 times the mass of our Sun and pass 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) apart at their closest approach — about the average distance separating Mars and the Sun. ...

Non-thermal X-rays from colliding wind shock acceleration in the massive binary Eta Carinae - Kenji Hamaguchi et al
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Re: NuSTAR: Superstar Eta Carinae Shoots Cosmic Rays

Post by neufer » Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:37 am

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_scattering#Inverse_Compton_scattering wrote:
<<Inverse Compton scattering is important in astrophysics. In X-ray astronomy, the accretion disk surrounding a black hole is presumed to produce a thermal spectrum. The lower energy photons produced from this spectrum are scattered to higher energies by relativistic electrons in the surrounding corona. This is surmised to cause the power law component in the X-ray spectra (0.2-10 keV) of accreting Black Holes.

The effect is also observed when photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) move through the hot gas surrounding a galaxy cluster. The CMB photons are scattered to higher energies by the electrons in this gas, resulting in the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. Observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect provide a nearly redshift-independent means of detecting galaxy clusters.

Some synchrotron radiation facilities scatter laser light off the stored electron beam. This Compton backscattering produces high energy photons in the MeV to GeV range subsequently used for nuclear physics experiments.>>
Art Neuendorffer

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