Astronomers see for the first time the astrosphere of a solar star

Boston – For the first time, astronomers have captured an image of an astrosphere about a star like the sun.

This hot gas bubble is swollen by the stellar wind of a star, a continuous flow of charged particles that each star releases. The sun version for this bubble, called heliosphere, marks the edge of our solar system and protects planets from most high -energy cosmic rays that zip for galaxy (Sn: 12/10/18, Sn: 10/15/09).

Astronomers have seen analog bubbles around hot stars, die stars and baby stars – but not sun -like stars.

“We don’t see them about … On average, everyday stars that can expect life,” Astronomy Carey Lensse said in 25 years of science with Chandra Symposium on December 3. “For 20 years, we’ve been looking for this effect, and I haven’t seen it.”

Lisse and his colleagues asked for a star that was blowing too hard. The researchers targeted the Observatory Orbiting Chandra X-Ray at HD 61005, nicknamed the Moth because it is surrounded by a backward waste disk resembling wings. Astronomers think the strange form is because the star is leaving in a dense gas cloud in space at a speed of about 10 kilometers per second (Sn: 1/22/08).

Meth is a size and measure similar to the sun, so “is a relatively good representative of us,” said Lisse, from Johns Hopkins’ applied physics laboratory in Laurel, MD. But he is a 100 million year old compared to the Sun 4 billion years old. Young stars tend to be more active and emit stronger solar winds than old ones. This additional activity, plus the star movement through the inter -star, made Lisse think that moth was a good target for detecting an astrosphere.

Observations showed that the moth is surrounded by an X -ray light halo that extends 100 times farther from the star than the Earth is from the sun. This light is astrosphere, said Lisse.

Singudesly, the bubble is round than in the shape of a wing. This means the wind is so strong, it pushes out to the dense cloud of gas more than the new push, like a thick balloon moving through the thin air.

Studying other solar stars astrosphere can tell us how the sun was in his youth, says Lisse. “We were so once,” he says. “Astrosphere is telling us about the history of the sun.”