(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers from the US and New Zealand has described an extremely rare type of star system that has all the makings of becoming a superstrong kilonova in the future.
The unusual double star system CPD-29 2176 is located about 11,400 light-years from Earth.
After studying it with the 1.5-meter SMARTS telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, an international team of astronomers found that both components of this system are extremely unusual.
One of them is a neutron star , formed as a result of a supernova explosion, and the second is a massive star that revolves around the first in an ultra-close circular orbit (it completes a complete revolution in just a couple of Earth months).
The final stage in the evolution of this star system may be a kilonova explosion, in which two neutron stars will merge together, giving rise to a super-powerful explosion, during which atoms of heavy metals, such as gold and silver, are formed.
Researchers estimate that there are no more than a dozen such systems in the entire Milky Way, and CPD-29 2176 is the first recorded in a terrestrial telescope.
The difficulty in the formation of a kilonova is the need for a moderate explosion of both stars – the predecessors of neutron stars: if the supernova flash turns out to be too powerful, the second star will simply be pushed out of orbit, after which the merger of two neutron stars will not occur.
Not surprisingly, kilonovae are so rare: only one in ten billion star systems can generate such an incredible explosion.
True, whatever the fate of CPD-29 2176, the astronomers of the future will observe the final stages of its evolution, and it is not a fact that they will be people: it will take at least a million years for the second star to burst into a supernova.
However, studying such stars allows astronomers to better understand how kilonovae are formed, the explosions of which give rise to the atoms of the heaviest elements in our universe.
The identification of the stars in CPD-29 2176 took the talk of kilonovae out of the realm of pure theories.
Now scientists plan to continue observing the binary system in the hope of building a sufficiently accurate model that will predict its future fate.
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