Astronomers have spent more than a decade seeking to explain why there was a ring of blue light surrounding a strange entity on Earth. They have been studying pictures captured on land as well as in space by telescopes.
Scientists now believe how the blue light was made, ending a 16-year-old mystery and describing in a distant location the background of a magnificent and dramatic object.
This discovery is the first time astronomers have detected a rare step in the development of stars that existed thousands of years after they started, and that was likely to last thousands of years, a brief time on the scale of stars.
The Blue Ring Nebula consists of two expanding cones of gas ejected into space by a stellar merger. As the gas cools, it forms hydrogen molecules that collide with particles in interstellar space, causing them to radiate far-ultraviolet light. Invisible to the human eye, it is shown here as blue.
It isn't a blue ring at all
Astronomers claim that in fact, the blue ring is not a ring but a cone. After a sun-like star swallowed a tiny friend, a layer of neon debris undoubtedly developed, and as a cone directly faced the planet, it appeared like a ring from Earth's perspective.
These two stars started life floating in space, but the younger of the two began spreading elements from their larger counterparts as the Sun-like star grew and moved closer to another star.
When the smaller star ate up, the impact ultimately caused a layer of debris that separated a disk plasma from the smaller star-creating two cone-shaped debris clouds.
Then the shock wave excited the hydrogen molecules in the debris, allowing them to shimmer with ultraviolet light, adding its title to the cloud.
Unfortunately, physicists have discovered that the ring of the sphere is not necessarily blue. The hue, instead, is just a depiction of the shining light around the object. They tell it was different, too, from what they experienced before.
The thesis was reported in the journal Nature on November 18. It is the first time scientists have seen the unusual step evolution of stars happening a few thousand years after they started and continuing only for a brief amount of time - about thousands of years.
Keri Hoadley, the lead author of the study from Caltech's David and Ellen Lee Postdoctoral Scholar in Physics, said that it is very normal to combine two stars. Due to the immense amount of particles, though, they will quickly become blurred until the ejecta they emitted expanded and cooled in orbit. This means the real occurrences on Earth are not apparent.
Hoadley also stated that as the dust eventually settles and we have a reasonable vision,' the object reveals a late period of the transient events. In the meantime, the scientists have claimed they were observing the phenomenon before it. Hoadley said The nebula would disappear into the interstellar medium after time, and we will not be able to know everything that occurred at all."
Experts finally unboxed mystery item
For years after the phenomenon was first spotted, physicists have been baffled. Mark Seibert, a Carnegie Institution for Science astrophysicist and a member of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) project, said they believed they'd worked out the puzzle and solved it but later they'd discover something flawed that told them what they're missing.
"As a physicist, that's a frightening thing. But I really love how special this object is and the work so many individuals placed in to find it out," Seibert said in a statement.
Numerous hypotheses regarding the origins of the object have been placed out by physicists. Next, astronomers sought to locate proof of a shock wave sending a gas storm into space surrounding the star. In California, they used Caltech's Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory and W. Hawaii's M. Keck Observatory.
They assumed then that the star might be killing an invisible neighboring planet. The 2017 Habitable Zone Planet Finder data shows, however, that there was no entity circling the star.
Although it took years to determine what triggered the blue rings, in the future, advanced technologies could uncover new knowledge.
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