A star located 7,000
light years from Earth will generate a flow of poisonous gamma rays and is aim it
seems that to our solar system, according to a team of physicists and
astronomers. Within a few hundred thousand years, in short, as the clocks of
cosmologists-Rayet star Wolf 104 (WR104), actually more of a binary system of
two stars that revolve around a common center of gravity, will explode
violently in a supernova
except it will not do since
most huge stars, according to Peter Tut hill, a researcher at the School of
Physics, University of Sydney (Australia), published this month in the important
Astrophysical Journal work of several years leading a team of researchers.
WR104 has a very fast
rotation, and massive stars that rotate at high speed, when they collapse in a
supernova, rather than suddenly explode, throwing first a intense flux of gamma
radiation by its two poles along its axis. According to Tut hill, the revolution
axis of the WR104 points directly to the area of space through which pass our
solar system in the Milky Way.
Wolf-Rayet star 104 has
a mass 25 times greater than the sun and, like most of the bigger stars than
ours, life is short and violent. For astronomers, the WR104 is a bomb with a
short fuse.
The star is already
dying, being ejected material and photos of Tut hill, taken over six years and
placed in sequence, like a movie, show the beautiful spiral drawing in space,
according to tour with his companion, leaving a trail of gas.
Tut hill and his team
worked for years with the optical observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii (USA),
mainly on observations of infrared radiation, the spectrum associated with hot
gas and dust around stars.
Adrian Mellot, an
astrophysicist at the University of Kansas, and proposed five years ago that a
stream of gamma rays that could reach Earth from a supernova about 450 million
years could be the cause of extinction of most plant and animal species at the
end of Silurian.
few seconds upon
exposure to an intense beam of gamma rays from a nearby supernova, a few
thousand light years is neighborhood to the astronomers may have caused,
according Mellot, the immediate destruction of almost all the ozone layer. A
few years, the Sun's ultraviolet radiation, atmospheric without the filter has
a deadly effect on the chromosome of alive organisms.
Although not found
further evidence of the coincidence of the great extinctions with supernova
explosions within our galaxy, biologists agree that such events would have
noticeable effects on living things.
Gamma-ray jets (Gamma
Ray Bursts, GRB) were identified in the years sixty after several false alarms
in the satellites military guarding nuclear weapons during the Cold War. According
to astronomers and physicists, the sudden contraction of a dying star without
enough mass to collapse into black hole, an emission of gamma rays whose
energy, in seconds, is equivalent to all that has issued the Sun in his life.
Explosions with an
energy as high as cosmologists have even strong enough to cause the birth of
new solar systems in their neighborhood, compacting with interstellar gas and
dust impact.
According to the
calculation of astronomers, a supernova exploded in our 'neighborhood' of the
Milky Way every 450,000 years on average, but not all explosions are preceded
by a jet of gamma rays and much less towards the Earth.
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