On January 12, the European Southern Observatory revealed a surprising mystery and they are stupefied, that wouldn't be the term, but they are very intrigued because what they have discovered is something very rare for an astronomer, which is quite something. Astronomers are surprised by a mysterious shock wave, as the headline of the statement says, around a dead star, astronomers used the Very Large Telescope, which is located on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert, which is in northern Chile.
And what they have seen is a spectacular shock wave called a bow wave, that is not something abnormal, it is around a dead star known as RXJ0528+2838, It is a white one, it is about 730 light years from Earth, this shock wave is shaped like a curved arc, it is like the wave that a ship forms when moving through the water, that is why it is called a bow wave and basically it is something similar.
This shock wave is made of gas and dust that the star pushes against the interstellar medium while it is moving, that is why it is physically very similar to the wave that forms a ship, these have already been seen quite a few, they are not abnormal, they can be impressive, beautiful, colorful, as you see, but they are not abnormal. Why is this one mysterious? Normally these shock waves in binary systems are produced because the white dwarf is stealing material from a companion star, in this case, this white dwarf star, which is the stellar corpse of a star, like the sun, for example, when the sun ends its life it will not explode, it will transform into a white lullaby.
In this case, this white dwarf star has a companion star that is also similar, curiously, to the sun, up to that point it is normal and when that happens, the normal thing is that when the white dwarf steals material from the companion star, a disk is formed around the white lullaby, but part of that material, in that circle, that spiral that is formed, ends up being expelled, forming powerful jets, flows and these end up colliding with, creating the shock wave as the entire system moves, the white star and the companion, that is, It is as if they were eating material from their companion, all that material ends up splashing everywhere and as they go, that shock wave is formed.
Here begins the problem and also the mystery and that is that in this system there is a white dwarf, and there is another star that is similar to the sun, but there is no disk, there is no theft of material, and yet, we are seeing what astronomers show us, a very powerful flow that has also been expelling material for at least 1000 years, it is something completely unexpected. Where does the material come from? The thing is that right now there is no mechanism that explains this material, basically it is energy that we are seeing because that material is being formed or heated or distorted by the movement of the star in that shock wave, it is not known where it comes from.
There is a suspicion that it may be that the white dwarf has a strong magnetic field that is acting as a mysterious engine, the mysterious engine is what it says in the statement, it is as if they were saying, "A magician did it." Literally that's how baffled they are by this story, they think that there may be something magnetic there that we don't know what it is, but that it is channeling matter from who knows where to form what you are seeing right now, that shock wave.
In short, it is a quiet binary system or it should be, where the white dwarf is not stealing material from its companion star, but against all odds it is creating one of the most beautiful and powerful shock waves that have been seen in this type of dead stars, it is a literal mystery.
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