An international team of astronomers discovered two stars in a binary system that make one revolution around each other for less than three hours, inside the planetary nebula M3-1. It is noteworthy that these stars may explode like a new one – an absolutely unexpected event for such a system, if we proceed from our current ideas about the evolution of binary systems.
Planetary nebulae are glittering shells of gas and dust that are formed from the outer layers of the matter of stars, like our Sun, dropped by these stars at the final stages of evolution. In many cases, interaction with a nearby companion star plays an important role in the distribution of the ejected material and the formation of intricate structures that can be distinguished by a detailed examination of the resulting planetary nebula.
The planetary nebula M3-1 is located in the constellation Canis Major, at a distance of about 14,000 light years from the solar system. Nebula M3-1 shows the characteristic features of a binary system, since jets and filaments can be distinguished in its structure, indicating interaction between the components in a binary system.
Using telescopes of the European Southern Observatory, researchers led by David Jones from the Canary Institute of Astrophysics, Spain, have observed the planetary nebula M3-1 for several years. These two stars are so close to each other that it is not possible to spatially resolve their images from Earth – instead, the presence of a second star in the system was established by changes in the brightness of the first star, which is periodically eclipsed by the second star in the process of orbital motion.
The team discovered that the central star of the planetary nebula M3-1 demonstrates one of the shortest orbital periods of the central stars known at the present time – just under three hours. These observations also showed that these two stars — most likely a white dwarf and a companion star of the main sequence, having a small mass — almost touch each other.
As a result, the couple experiences what is called a new eruption – the result of the transfer of material from one star to another. When the second star gains a critical mass, a powerful thermonuclear explosion occurs, and the brightness of the system temporarily increases hundreds of thousands of times.
An extremely close pair of stars has been discovered inside the planetary nebula M3-1
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