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Dramatic dying star blows smoke rings in unique celestial show

Dramatic dying star blows smoke rings in unique celestial show
An artist's impression of the strange "smoke rings" emitted from the dying star V Hya
An artist's impression of the strange "smoke rings" emitted from the dying star V Hya
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An artist's impression of the strange "smoke rings" emitted from the dying star V Hya
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An artist's impression of the strange "smoke rings" emitted from the dying star V Hya
A composite image of the dying star V Hya, with its six rings clearly visible
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A composite image of the dying star V Hya, with its six rings clearly visible

A strange star just got even stranger. In the midst of its death throes, the star V Hya has been belching out a series of rings and plumes of materials, in a pattern never before seen from a dying star.

V Hya is located about 1,300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Hydra. As a carbon-rich red giant star, it’s currently in its final stages of life, shedding its outer layers ahead of a final outburst to become a white dwarf wrapped in a nebula.

But V Hya seems to be taking an unusual route to that end. Peering closer at the star using the ALMA radio telescope, astronomers realized that V Hya isn’t releasing its material in a uniform way as would be expected – instead, it’s blowing out a series of "smoke rings." The team spotted six rings in all, which appear to have been produced over the last 2,100 years or so – a very short time on a celestial scale. These rings are forming a warped disk around the star, which the team gave the questionable moniker of DUDE, for “Disk Undergoing Dynamical Expansion.”

But those rings aren’t V Hya’s only outburst. The astronomers also noticed huge hourglass-like clouds being thrown above and below the star, which are expanding at speeds of 864,000 km/h (537,000 mph).

Even before these new discoveries, V Hya was a very fascinating star. It’s previously been found to fire off Mars-sized balls of plasma every eight and a half years, with astronomers chalking up this bizarre behavior to an unseen neighbor, like a neutron star or white dwarf. If this compact companion orbits V Hya every 8.5 years, it would periodically swing through the star’s swollen outer atmosphere, slurp up some material then shoot it off into space.

Altogether, these features make V Hya an absolutely unique object, which could have much to teach astronomers about the life and death of stars.

“The end state of stellar evolution – when stars undergo the transition from being red giants to ending up as white dwarf stellar remnants – is a complex process that is not well understood,” said Mark Morris, co-author of the study. “The discovery that this process can involve the ejections of rings of gas, simultaneous with the production of high-speed, intermittent jets of material, brings a new and fascinating wrinkle to our exploration of how stars die.”

The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: National Radio Astronomy Observatory

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