Royal Astronomical Society | 2018 Oct 23
An international team of astronomers have discovered two stars in a binary pair that complete an orbit around each other in a little over three hours, residing in the planetary nebula M3-1. Remarkably, the stars could drive a nova explosion, an entirely unexpected event based on our current understanding of binary star evolution. ...
Planetary nebulae are the glowing shells of gas and dust formed from the outer layers of stars like our own Sun, which they throw off during the final stages of their evolution. In many cases, interaction with a nearby companion star plays an important role in the ejection of this material and the formation of the elaborate structures seen in the resulting planetary nebulae.
The planetary nebula M3-1 is located in the constellation of Canis Major, at a distance of roughly 14,000 light years. M3-1 was a firm candidate to host a binary central star, as its structure with prominent jets and filaments is typical of these binary star interactions.
Using the telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, Jones’s team looked at M3-1 over a period of several years. In the process they discovered and studied the binary stars in the centre of the nebula. ...
The two stars are so close together that they cannot be resolved from the ground, so instead the presence of the second star is inferred from the variation of their observed combined brightness - most obviously by periodic eclipses of one star by the other which produce marked drops in the brightness. ...
The Short Orbital Period Binary Star at the Heart of the Planetary Nebula M 3-1 ~ David Jones et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS: Letters 482(1):L75 (Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly142
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1807.11388 > 30 Jul 2018