Astrophotography

Watch star erupting as spotted by Hubble

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

A stellar volcano, watch star erupting as spotted by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured stunning images of the binary star system R Aquarii, where a red giant and white dwarf engage in explosive interactions. These outbursts eject glowing plasma filaments, providing insights into stellar evolution and the redistribution of nuclear material.

Roughly 700 light-years away, R Aquarii is one of the closest stars known to undergo violent eruptions, ejecting large amounts of processed nuclear material into space. This system, classified as symbiotic, is part of a group of 150 known variable stars. Symbiotic stars are composed of two vastly different types of stars: a cool red giant and a small white dwarf companion. These stars are surrounded by a glowing nebula formed from the gas escaping the red giant.

Stellar Volcano: Watch star erupting as spotted by Hubble

In 1939, Edwin Hubble first observed the expansion of the nebula, and by the 1970s, astronomers discovered jets of matter streaming in opposite directions, resembling a lawn sprinkler. It is now known that R Aquarii has experienced several violent eruptions, the latest one likely occurring in the late 1970s. These explosions occur when the white dwarf approaches the red giant, siphons hydrogen, and undergoes a thermonuclear explosion on its surface. The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been monitoring R Aquarii since 1990, has captured recent images showing colorful twisted filaments, resembling the patterns made by a Spirograph toy.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has recently delivered a vivid close-up view of R Aquarii, revealing the enormous spiral pattern created by its dramatic eruptions. The binary star system’s violent outbursts send filaments of glowing gas hurtling into space, with twisted streams of plasma forming complex trails. These eruptions offer a glimpse into how the universe recycles nuclear material that is formed deep inside stars and expelled into space.

Oddball stellar duo creates spectacular fireworks

R Aquarii belongs to the symbiotic star class, where the red giant primary star, classified as a Mira variable, is over 400 times larger than the Sun. This star pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness dramatically over a 390-day period. At its peak, the red giant shines 5,000 times brighter than the Sun. Its white dwarf companion periodically siphons off hydrogen from the red giant, leading to explosive outbursts that eject material in a dramatic fashion.

The outbursts create geyser-like filaments that shoot out from the system’s core, forming loops and trails of plasma. These streams are twisted by the explosion and shaped by magnetic fields into a spiral pattern. The plasma is expelled into space at over 1 million miles per hour, glowing in visible light due to the intense radiation from the stellar duo.

Hubble’s first observations of R Aquarii in 1990 revealed the binary system, with the two stars separated by approximately 1.6 billion miles. More recent observations by the ESA/Hubble team, spanning from 2014 to 2023, have provided a timelapse of R Aquarii’s evolution, showing the star’s dramatic behavior and its dimming and brightening due to pulsations in the red giant.

The scale of this system’s outbursts is vast, with space-blasted material extending up to 248 billion miles from the stars—24 times the diameter of our solar system. Observations like these from Hubble are reshaping our understanding of unique stellar phenomena, like the "volcanoes" of R Aquarii.

The Hubble Space Telescope, now operating for over 30 years, continues to contribute to ground-breaking discoveries. Hubble is a collaborative project between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope and mission operations, with support from Lockheed Martin Space. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts science operations for NASA.