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Have you ever heard of a runaway star?
It's a star moving through space with an abnormally high velocity, after being hurled out of a stellar association of which it was formerly a member.
It's the case of Zeta Ophiuchi (ζ Oph, ζ Ophiuchi),
Source➡️ https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2022/zetaoph/
Have you ever heard of a runaway star?
It's a star moving through space with an abnormally high velocity, after being hurled out of a stellar association of which it was formerly a member.
It's the case of Zeta Ophiuchi (ζ Oph, ζ Ophiuchi),
Source➡️ https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2022/zetaoph/
Comments
one of the closest O-type stars to Earth & one of the best studied cases of a bow shock around a runaway massive star.
Astronomers hypothesized that Zeta Ophiuchi may be a former component of a binary star system in which the more massive primary was destroyed in a Type II supernova explosion,
and it accreted mass from its companion before it was ejected.
Zeta Ophiuchi, some 440 ly away in the Ophiuchus constellation, is a star about 20 times more massive and 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun.
The image shows a composite of Zeta Ophiuchi, seen in Spitzer (green and red) and
Chandra data (blue).
X-rays detected by Chandra come from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the effects of a shock wave.
The spectacular shock wave was formed by matter blowing away from the star’s surface and slamming into gas in its path.
In a study by S. Green et al. 2022, researchers report the first detailed computational investigation of Zeta Ophiuchi’s bow shock➡️ https://aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/202243531
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Dublin Inst. Advanced Studies/S. Green et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/Spitzer