Now you see it, now you don't.Now you see it, now you don't The sudden disappearance of a star often provides a clear sign that an unseen, orbiting companion has moved in front of it, blocking the star's light. Eventually, as the obscuring companion moves aside, the star reappears. In the case of an unusual blue star (designated PG 1500+131) in the constellation Ophiuchus, the reappearance happens after only 12 minutes. Observed last summer by Reinhold Hafner of the European Southern Observatory European Southern Observatory (ESO), an intergovernmental organization for astronomical research with headquarters in Garching, near Munich, Germany. The ESO began in 1962 as a consortium among Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. at La Silla in Chile, this vanishing act "Vanishing Act" is an episode of The Outer Limits television series. It first aired on 21 July, 1996, during the second season. Introduction Trevor McPhee makes a quick trip to the shops, but after a strange experience he returns home to find that ten years have represents the most complete and arguably the fastest stellar eclipse yet seen. The double-star system apparently consists of one star that has already evolved into a small, bright, compact object (a white dwarf white dwarf, in astronomy, a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of the earth but does not emit enough light or other radiation to be ) and another, faint star (a red dwarf red dwarf A small, dim star with relatively cool surface temperatures, positioned to the lower right on the main sequence in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Red dwarfs, at about 0.1 to 0. ) still in the main phase of its life, converting hydrogen fuel into helium. When the fainter star passes in front of its brighter partner, only light from the fainter star is visible. Because the darkening dark·en v. dark·ened, dark·en·ing, dark·ens v.tr. 1. a. To make dark or darker. b. To give a darker hue to. 2. To fill with sadness; make gloomy. 3. is so complete, the red dwarf must be less than one-hundredth as bright as the white dwarf. Moreover, the short duration of the eclipse indicates the faint star is also very small. The two stars orbit roughly 700,000 kilometers apart, meaning the entire system would fit within the space filled by our sun. The discovery of this binary star system provides important information about a rarely observed phase in the evolution of binary stars. The stars seem in a state that immediately precedes the unstable "cataclysmic cat·a·clysm n. 1. A violent upheaval that causes great destruction or brings about a fundamental change. 2. A violent and sudden change in the earth's crust. 3. A devastating flood. " phase, in which a stream of gas begins to flow from the larger to the smaller star, causing the smaller star to brighten abruptly. Futher observations of the system are planned for later this year. |
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