Press Trust of IndiaJanuary 22, 2021 09:22:32 IST
Astronauts, with the help of India’s first multi-wave space satellite Astrosat, have spotted a massive globe in the Milky Way galaxy with rare UV-bright stars in it, the Department of Science and Technology said Thursday. These stars have an almost open inner heart, making them very hot, in the late stages of evolution of a Sun-like star. It is unclear how these stars end their lives as few are found in these rapidly changing stages, making the study crucial.
The ancient globe records are known as the dinosaurs of the universe, showcasing excellent laboratories where astronomers can understand how stars evolve through different stages between birth and death with stunning ultraviolet images of the universe. cluster from an on-board Ultraviolet Image Telescope (UVIT).
The ancient world records provide excellent laboratories where astronomers can understand how stars evolve through different stages between birth and death. Image credit: Wikipedia / Richard Hook, ESO
With AstroSat, astronomers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, an institute in the Department of Science and Technology, distinguished the UV-bright hot stars from the slightly colder red giant and prime-order stars that show dim in the those images.
The findings of this study were approved for publication in ‘The Astrophysical Journal‘. The team of scientists consisting of Deepthi S Prabhu, Annapurni Subramaniam and Snehalata Sahu from IIA combined the UVIT data with observations made using other space missions such as the Hubble space telescope and the Gaia telescope along with optical observations. grounded.
About 34 UV-bright stars were detected as members of the global body. From the data, the team obtained the properties of these stars such as the surface temperature, light and radii.
“One of the UV-bright stars was found to be about 3,000 times brighter than the Sun with a surface temperature of around 1,00,000 kelvin,” Subramaniam said.
The properties of these stars were then used to apply what astronomers call the Hertzsprung-Russel (HR) diagram together with theoretical models to shed light on the properties of their parent stars and to predict how they are growing in the future.
Most of the stars were found to have emerged from a level of sun called the flat-branched stars with very little outer casing.
So they were going to scrape the last big step of life called the asymptotic giant stage and just be a dead remnant or a white dwarf.
“Such UV-bright stars are thought to be the cause of the ultraviolet radiation coming from old stellar systems such as elliptical galaxies that do not have young blue stars. Therefore, it is more important to see more such stars. to understand their features, the DST said.
Launched in September 2020, Astrosat has helped unravel the mysteries of the universe.
It has made more than 1,166 views of 800 unique square sources recommended by scientists both from India and abroad.