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It is not yet clear to what extent the explosion of the solar system, identified as Wolf Rayet type, will also affect planet Earth, which is 8,000 light years away. The recently discovered solar system resembles a cosmic wheel, with a special characteristic, being dual, composed of two stars, that astrophysicists did not expect to discover even in our galaxy.
The discovered solar system was “baptized” by astrophysicists with the name “Apep”, which comes from the Egyptian god of chaos. As a result, even scientists do not quite understand what to do, as the discovery was momentous.
The main theory explaining this strange behavior makes “Apep” a strong competitor to a gamma-ray burst when it explodes, which will eventually happen, which never happened in the Milky Way.
Dr Joe Callingham, a co-author of the study at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said there is a lot of research on Wolf-Rayet star systems. “These are in fact the peacocks of the stellar world. The discoveries about these elegant, beautiful, but potentially dangerous objects, cause a real noise in astronomy”, specified the specialist.
The solar system watched with concern
Recently, the team of specialists that followed the system that is about to explode, showed that “Apep” was not composed only by a star of the Wolf-Rayet type, but actually two, a fact attested by astronomers of the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronautics. from Japan, which will soon publish an article on another system, Wolf-Rayet 112.
The two stars that make up the “Apep” system are between 10 and 15 times larger than the Sun and more than 100,000 times brighter. Furthermore, Wolf-Rayet stars have an estimated temperature of 25,000 degrees or more.
According to the team’s latest discoveries, the massive stars in the “Apep” binary orbit each other every 125 years, at a distance comparable to the size of our solar system. “The speed of the stellar winds produced is simply amazing. The stars rotate at about 12 million kilometers per hour; this is 1% speed of light. However, the dust produced by this system expands much more slowly, about a quarter of the speed of the stellar wind. It probably means that stellar winds are thrown in different directions at different speeds. The expansion of the dust that we measure is driven by slower winds thrown near the star’s equator. Our model now fits quite well with the observed data, but we have not yet explained the physics of stellar rotation very well, ”said another specialist, Yinou Han.
If the two stars exploded in the next period, it would produce gamma radiation, and it is very difficult to estimate to what extent they will affect planet Earth. “Gamma explosions are among the most energetic events in the universe. And they are life-threatening. If a gamma-ray burst were to hit Earth, it could strip the planet of its precious ozone layer, exposing us all to ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Fortunately, Apep’s axis of rotation means that it does not pose a threat to Earth, “said Professor Peter Tuthill.
