Officials Detect Giant ‘Zombie’ Star On The Run
It turns out Earth is not the only sphere in our galaxy preparing for Halloween. The second-closest star cluster to Earth, the Hyades star cluster, is just 153 light-years away from our planet and makes up the head of the Bull in the Taurus constellation.
From this cluster, a “zombie” star has awoken and is now bursting its way out of the Hyades star cluster. The zombie star is moving as fast as 22,000 miles per hour (10 kilometers per second) when compared to the Hyades star cluster from which it escaped.
But instead of being alarmed by this runway star, scientists see it as an exciting opportunity that will help their unanswered questions surrounding the Hyades star cluster. The Hyades star cluster is made up of several hundreds of stars, all formed around the same time—about 625 million years ago.
But, the cluster only contains a few white dwarfs at its core. This is strange, considering 97% of stars in the Milky Way will experience their final stage in life as a white dwarf. Astronomers have wondered what happens to these missing stars.
One theory is they are launched out of the cluster due to interactions with other star clusters, as well as, possibly, gas clouds moving between the clusters. The stars in this particular constellation are also loosely bound, so it would be easy for them to be ejected through these interactions.
In order to test the theory, researchers from the University of British Columbia used data the Gaia spacecraft collected after it tracked over 1 billion stars in the Milky Way since 2013. Officials found three white dwarfs they believe were ejected from the Hyades cluster, one of which was 1.3 times more massive than the sun.
Most white dwarfs have a mass that is 0.6 times that of the sun, and are formed from stars that have run out of hydrogen fuel in their cores. In most cases, the celestial bodies are created once they pull material from a companion star.
However, the runaway white dwarf the astronomers were able to track down appears to have been created from just one star, which could mean it is the largest white dwarf created from a single star that has been discovered thus far.
