Twin stars observed in the Orion Nebula. At this distance the twin stars appear as a single point of light.
Click on image for full size
Image Courtesy of NASA-JPL/HST and David James (Vanderbilt)
Newly Born Twin Stars are Far From Identical
News story originally written on June 18, 2008
Two stars, each with the same mass and in orbit around each other, are twins that one would expect to be identical. So astronomers were surprised when they discovered that twin stars in the Orion Nebula were not identical at all. In fact, these stars showed significant differences in brightness, surface temperature, and possibly even size.
It seems that one of the stars formed significantly earlier than its twin. Because astrophysicists have assumed that twin stars form at the same time, this new discovery adds an important new challenge for today's star formation theories and will force scientists to look back at their models to see if their models can produce twin stars that have formed at different times.
This new discovery may cause astronomers to readjust their estimates for thousands of young stars.
The newly formed twin stars are about 1 million years old. With a full life span of about 50 billion years, that makes them equivalent to one-day-old human babies.
"The easiest way to explain the observed differences is if one star was fully formed about 500,000 years before its twin. That would be equivalent to a human birth-order difference of about half a day," said Keivan Stassun, associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University.
You might also be interested in:
Would it be more difficult to pull an elephant or a mouse? If you pulled each animal with the same amount of force, the elephant would respond less to pulling, even if he didn’t pull back at all. That’s
...more
Astronomers use a special term to talk about the brightness of stars. The term is "magnitude". The magnitude scale was invented by the ancient Greeks around 150 B.C. The Greeks put the stars they could
...more
Scientists have learned that Mount Hood, Oregon's tallest mountain, has erupted in the past due to the mixing of two different types of magma. "The data will help give us a better road map to what a future
...more
The Earth's mantle is a rocky, solid shell that is between the Earth's crust and the outer core, and makes up about 84 percent of the Earth's volume. The mantle is made up of many distinct portions or
...more
Some geologic faults that appear strong and stable, slip and slide like weak faults, causing earthquakes. Scientists have been looking at one of these faults in a new way to figure out why. In theory,
...more
The sun goes through cycles that last approximately 11 years. These solar cycle include phases with more magnetic activity, sunspots, and solar flares. They also include phases with less activity. The
...more
Studying tree rings doesn't only tell us the age of that tree. Tree rings also show what climate was like for each year of a tree's life, which means they can tell us about climates of the past and about
...more
