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Every so often a discovery comes about that requires our astronomers and astrophysicists to basically throw out the rule book. The discovery of a completely unheard-of type of star has done just that. Astronomers have discovered a pair of stars that are covered in oxygen and carbon instead of the typical surface composition of hydrogen and helium. Initially, scientists were puzzled, but they now believe that this could have been the end result of a bizarre and unlikely collision between two stellar bodies.
New Type Of Star Covered In Carbon And Oxygen Discovered By Astronomershttps://t.co/HW6KpeuVEj pic.twitter.com/nMPRETXiY3
— IFLScience (@IFLScience) February 14, 2022
The facts that are throwing off the team of astronomers are that these stars are coated in Oxygen and carbon which usually indicates a star that has burned off all of the helium within it, but the stars’ temperatures and radii would indicate that there is still helium-burning within them.
The team that discovered the pair of stars, led by Professor Klaus Werner of the University of Tübingen, explained the oddity of the unusual pair.
“Normally we expect stars with these surface compositions to have already finished burning helium in their cores, and to be on their way to becoming white dwarfs. These new stars are a severe challenge to our understanding of stellar evolution.”
The Type of Star That Breaks The Rules
Dr. Miller Bertolami of the Institute for Astrophysics of La Plata, published a second paper alongside Dr. Werner’s findings. He explained to the Royal Astronomical Society, “We believe the stars discovered by our German colleagues might have formed in a very rare kind of stellar merger event between two white dwarf stars”. This bears some reasonability because White dwarfs are typically stars that have exhausted their thermonuclear fuel and are extremely small and dense.
“Usually, white dwarf mergers do not lead to the formation of stars enriched in carbon and oxygen”, Bertolami explained, “but we believe that, for binary systems formed with very specific masses, a carbon- and oxygen-rich white dwarf might be disrupted and end up on top of a helium-rich one, leading to the formation of these stars”.
The RAS observed that “no current stellar evolutionary models can fully explain the newly discovered stars.” Remember, ‘throwing out the rule book’, well the scientists observing this pair are about to pen an entirely new volume. They need newer more refined models assessing whether these mergers can actually occur and result in colliding white dwarfs exchanging mass to result in oxygen-carbon enriched white dwarf stars. The two stars PG1654+322 and PG1528+025 will be teaching us new lessons for years to come.
