HPU Professor Publishes Investigate on Discovery of a New Star Technique
Dr. Brad Barlow, associate professor of astrophysics, together with a number of collaborators, not long ago posted a peer-reviewed paper in the Month to month Notices of the Royal Astronomical Modern society, a person of the world’s foremost astronomy journals. His perform focuses on the discovery of a new symbiotic star system identified as Hen 3-860.
The system consists of a pink giant star, which is just about 75 occasions much larger than the solar, orbiting a dense, earth-sized white dwarf star. The two stars are shut adequate with each other that the pink large star deposits material onto the white dwarf star, main to occasional “outbursts,” which make the process brighter. Symbiotic stars like Hen 3-860 instruct astronomers extra about stellar evolution and interacting binaries.
“In astronomy, we are utilised to functioning with objects that evolve more than millions or billions of decades,” explained Barlow. “I uncover units like Hen 3-860 unbelievably enjoyable, as they clearly show appreciable variations in their qualities from working day to day. If we could notice the system up near in a spaceship, we would uncover the interaction amongst these stars to be really violent from time to time!”
Barlow used the CHIRON spectrograph on the 1.5-m SMARTS telescope in the Andes Mountains in Chile to observe the technique and support characterize its nature. This exploration was conducted by a staff of astronomers from HPU, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Chile and Ontario.
