Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics.
A state of matter last seen just after the Big Bang may exist inside neutron stars — and scientists think they can prove itAstronomers just watched a star 1,540 times the size of our sun transform into a hypergiant.
Will it go supernova?Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsSign up to our monthly entertainment newsletter to keep up with all our coverage of the latest sci-fi and space movies, tv shows, games and books.Discover this week's must-see night sky events, moon phases, and stunning astrophotos. Sign up for our skywatching newsletter and explore the universe with us!Space.com's Sci-Fi Reader's Club. Read a sci-fi short story every month and join a virtual community of fellow science fiction fans!Brown dwarfs may have gained the unfortunate nickname"failed stars," but new research suggests they can collide and merge for a second chance at success.— when vast, overly dense patches of matter collapse in interstellar clouds of gas and dust — they fail to gather enough mass from these clouds to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines a"main sequence" star, like the sun., a team of scientists has discovered a tightly orbiting pair of brown dwarfs that are working together to combat this"failure." One brown dwarf is actively siphoning material from its companion, meaning it could achieve the mass needed to trigger nuclear fusion in its core and become a fully-fledged star. Either that, or these brown dwarfs will collide and merge, birthing an entirely new star with enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion.James Webb Space Telescope discovers what remains after two stars collide and explode as a red novasaid in a statement ."Brown dwarfs don't have internal engines like stars do, but this result shows they can exhibit very interesting dynamic physics." The team's findings are extraordinary because, though similar mass transfer has been seen in binary objects before, this has occurred between stellar bodies with far greater masses. "These are very exotic objects," team member Tom Prince of Caltech said."We've told some of our colleagues about them, and they didn't believe such a thing exists."The brown dwarf pairing at the heart of this discovery, found in the ZTF Variability Archive, is designated ZTF J1239+8347 and is located around 1,000 light-years away in the constellation. The two brown dwarfs, both 60 to 80 times as massive as Jupiter, orbit each other so tightly that the entire ZTF J1239 system would fit between Earth andContact me with news and offers from other Future brandsThe researchers can't be sure how these brown dwarfs initially came to orbit each other, but they suspect that the failed stars were pulled from separate systems and pushed together by the gravitational influence of another star. Once orbiting each other, the brown dwarfs would have gradually spiraled closer and closer together, with the gravitational influence of one brown dwarf causing its counterpart to puff out and become less dense. "When one star's gravity is overcome by the other's, matter starts flowing from the less dense star to the denser star," Whitebook said."It's like the matter sloughs off through a nozzle." This"nozzle" sprays matter from the puffy brown dwarf to one spot on its denser companion. This region is heated and begins to glow brightly. As this bright spot rotates with its parent brown dwarf, it generates a significant change in the brightness of this system every 57 seconds. It is this signal that first made this system stand out among the 2 billion objects of the ZTF Variability Archive. This is the first mass transfer process seen in a brown dwarf pairing, but the team believes there could be many more brown dwarf pairings such as this just waiting to be uncovered. to detect dozens more of these objects," Whitebook concluded."We want to find more to understand the population and how common it is. We predict this happens more than you think." Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.Black HolesA state of matter last seen just after the Big Bang may exist inside neutron stars — and scientists think they can prove itHubble and NASA space telescopes track 'game-changing' gamma-ray burst back to neutron star collision in 'forbidden' region of the universeA state of matter last seen just after the Big Bang may exist inside neutron stars — and scientists think they can prove it
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