When a star runs out of fuel, It scatters the outer layers of its gas and, if it does not explode in a supernova, forms a glowing shell of ionized gas that expands into space.
Shells like these are known as the nebulae of the planets, and they make for some of the most colorful, picturesque images we see of the universe. As beautiful as they are, the nebulae of the planets have long been astronomical mysteries. Until recently, scientists did not know the reason behind their strange shape.
However, a team of astronomers has solved this artistic mystery only after a detailed observation of the winds of the stars around the aging stars.
Their findings are detailed in a study published in the journal Thursday Science And give scientists a unique view of what the shape of our sun could be.
The colorful future of the sun – The Sun will run out of fuel in about 5 billion years, become a red giant star, or become a bright mass of low mass near the end of life.
The dead star eventually forms a nebula of planets around it, warming up as its radiation glows the extended raised layers of material. The nebulae of the planets produced by the stars are almost never round, instead producing a variety of colorful shapes.
“The sun – which will eventually become a red giant – is as round as a billiard ball, so we wondered: how could such a star shape all this?” Lead author Lynn Desin, a researcher at the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy, explains.
Using the ALMA Observatory in Chile, Desin and his team examined stellar winds that emitted an aging star carrying particles. The team collected the most detailed collection of wind observations of these stars so far, using the same method to be able to compare each of them directly.
The team assumed that this wind would be round in shape. However, the findings do not match their predictions: some of the stellar winds were disc-shaped, others spiral or conical.
“We saw that this wind is nothing but symmetrical or spherical,” Desin said. “Some of them are very similar in shape to the nebulae of the planets.”
How did the wind get these strange different shapes? – Studies suggest that the wind was shaped by other, lower mass stars or heavier planets that formed near the dying star.
“All of our observations can be explained by the fact that they are stellar companions,” Desin said. “How can you make a spiral pattern by dipping a little milk into a cup of coffee, mate sucking the material towards it as it revolves around the star and shapes the stellar wind.”
Like our solar age, its shape will be determined by the allies around it.
“Jupiter or even Saturn – because they have such a large mass – will affect whether the sun passes in the center of a spiral, a butterfly, or any other shape we see in the planetary nebula today.” Said Desi.
Abstract: Binary interactions dominate the evolution of giant stars, but their role for lower and intermediate-mass stars is less clear. The evolution of spherical winds from the asymptomatic giant branch (AGB) star may be due to binary interactions in the nebula of non-spherical planets. We observed a sample of AGB stars with the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array (ALMA) and found that they showed distinctive non-spherical geometry with morphological similarities with the nebula (PN) of their wind planets. We hypothesize that the same physics shapes both ABB wind and PN; In addition, morphology and AGB mass-loss rate are correlated. These characteristics can be explained by binary interaction. We propose an evolutionary scenario for AGB morphologies that include AGB stars and P.N. Consistent with the events observed in
