NASA Chandra Image: Companion star survives supernova blast

Credit X-ray: NASA /CXC /SAO /F.Seward et al; Optical: NOAO /CTIO /MCELS, DSS

When a massive star runs out fuel, it collapses and explodes as a supernova.

Although these explosions are extremely powerful, it is possible for a companion star to endure the blast.

A team of astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes has found evidence for one of these survivors.

This hardy star is in a stellar explosion's debris field, also called its supernova remnant, located in an HII region called DEM L241.

An HII region is created when the radiation from hot, young stars strips away the electrons from neutral hydrogen atoms (HI) to form clouds of ionized hydrogen (HII).

This HII region is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way.

A new composite image of DEM L241 contains Chandra data (purple) that outlines the supernova remnant.

The remnant remains hot and therefore X-ray bright for thousands of years after the original explosion occurred.

Also included in this image are optical data from the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) taken from ground-based telescopes in Chile (yellow and cyan), which trace the HII emission produced by DEM L241.

Additional optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey (white) are also included, showing stars in the field.

R. Davies, K. Elliott, and J. Meaburn, whose last initials were combined to give the object the first half of its name, first mapped DEM L241 in 1976.

The recent data from Chandra revealed the presence of a point-like X-ray source at the same location as a young massive star within DEM L241's supernova remnant.

Astronomers can look at the details of the Chandra data to glean important clues about the nature of X-ray sources.

For example, how bright the X-rays are, how they change over time, and how they are distributed across the range of energy that Chandra observes.

In this case, the data suggest that the point-like source is one component of a binary star system.

In such a celestial pair, either a neutron star or black hole (formed when the star went supernova) is in orbit with a star much larger than our Sun.

As they orbit one another, the dense neutron star or black hole pulls material away its companion star through the wind of particles that flows away from its surface.

If this result is confirmed, DEM L241 would be only the third binary containing both a massive star and a neutron star or black hole ever found in the aftermath of a supernova.

More information: A paper describing these results is available online and was published in the November 10, 2012, issue of The Astrophysical Journal: dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/759/2/123

Survivor of stellar collision is new type of pulsating star

Artist's impression of the eclipsing, pulsating binary star J0247-25. 

Credit: Keele University

A team of astronomers from the UK, Germany and Spain have observed the remnant of a stellar collision and discovered that its brightness varies in a way not seen before on this rare type of star.

By analysing the patterns in these brightness variations, astronomers will learn what really happens when stars collide.

This discovery will be published in the 27 June 2013 issue of the journal Nature.

Stars like our Sun expand and cool to become red giant stars when the hydrogen that fuels the nuclear fusion in their cores starts to run out.

Many stars are born in binary systems so an expanding red giant star will sometimes collide with an orbiting companion star.

As much as 90% of the red giant star's mass can be stripped off in a stellar collision, but the details of this process are not well understood.

Only a few stars that have recently emerged from a stellar collision are known, so it has been difficult to study the connection between stellar collisions and the various exotic stellar systems they produce.

When an eclipsing binary system containing one such star turned up as a by-product of a search for extrasolar planets, Dr Pierre Maxted and his colleagues decided to use the high-speed camera ULTRACAM to study the eclipses of the star in detail.

These new high-speed brightness measurements show that the remnant of the stripped red giant is a new type of pulsating star.

Many stars, including our own Sun, vary in brightness because of pulsations caused by sound waves bouncing around inside the star.

For both the Sun and the new variable star, each pulsation cycle takes about 5 minutes. These pulsations can be used to study the properties of a star below its visible surface.

Computer models produced by the discovery team show that the sound waves probe all the way to the centre of the new pulsating star.

Further observations of this star are now planned to work out how long it will be before the star starts to cool and fade to produce a stellar corpse ("white dwarf'") of abnormally low mass.

Dr Pierre Maxted from Keele University, who led the study, said "We have been able to find out a lot about these stars, such as how much they weigh, because they are in a binary system. This will really help us to interpret the pulsation signal and so figure out how these stars survived the collision and what will become of them over the next few billion years."

Survivor Black Holes May Be Mid-Sized

New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton strengthens the case that two mid-sized black holes exist close to the center of a nearby starburst galaxy.

These "survivor" black holes avoided falling into the center of the galaxy and could be examples of the seeds required for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies, including the one in the Milky Way.

For several decades, scientists have had strong evidence for two distinct classes of black hole: the stellar-mass variety with masses about ten times that of the Sun, and the supermassive ones, located at the center of galaxies, that range from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses.

But a mystery has remained: what about black holes that are in between? Evidence for these objects has remained controversial, and until now there were no strong claims of more than one such black hole in a single galaxy. Recently, a team of researchers has found signatures in X-ray data of two mid-sized black holes in the starburst galaxy M82 located 12 million light years from Earth.

"This is the first time that good evidence for two mid-sized black holes has been found in one galaxy," said Hua Feng of the Tsinghua University in China, who led two papers describing the results. "Their location near the center of the galaxy might provide clues about the origin of the Universe's largest black holes - supermassive black holes found in the centers of most galaxies."

One possible mechanism for the formation of supermassive black holes involves a chain reaction of collisions of stars in compact star clusters that results in the buildup of extremely massive stars, which then collapse to form intermediate-mass black holes. The star clusters then sink to the center of the galaxy, where the intermediate-mass black holes merge to form a supermassive black hole.