{"id":792744,"date":"2025-01-16T11:23:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-16T16:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=792744"},"modified":"2025-01-16T11:23:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T16:23:03","slug":"colliding-stars-stellar-siphoning-and-a-now-a-blue-lurker-this-star-system-has-seen-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=792744","title":{"rendered":"Colliding Stars, Stellar Siphoning, and a now a &#8220;Blue Lurker.&#8221; This Star System has Seen it All"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Triple star systems are more common than might be imagined \u2013 about one in ten of every Sun-like star is part of a system with two other stars. However, the dynamics of such a system are complex, and understanding the history of how they came to be even more so. Science took a step towards doing so with a recent paper by Emily Leiner from the Illinois Institute of Technology and her team.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-170461\"\/><\/p>\n<p>They examined a star called WOCS 14020 in the star cluster M67, which is about 2,800 light years away from Earth. It is currently orbiting a massive white dwarf star with a mass of about .76 times that of the Sun (about 50% heavier than a typical white dwarf). That pairing hints at a much more interesting past.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Leiner and her team believe that WOCS 14020 was originally part of a triple star system\u2014specifically, that it orbited a binary pair of much larger stars. Around 500 million years ago, the two stars in the binary merged, briefly creating a much more massive star that pushed some of its material onto its third companion star.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Can Stars Collide?\" width=\"1110\" height=\"624\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZucjiKb6IRI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Fraser talks about stellar collisions, which caused WOCS 14020\u2019s current state.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Absorbing that material caused WOCS 14020 to start speeding up its spin. It now rotates once every four days, rather than typically once every thirty days, which is common to other Sun-like stars. This faster rotation feature is key to Dr. Leiner and her team\u2019s classification of the star \u2013 a \u201cblue lurker.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To understand what that classification means, we must first understand another type of star, the blue straggler. Blue stragglers are stars that also have gained mass from another star and appear hotter, brighter, and \u201cbluer\u201d than they would be expected to be given their age. In this case, all three features are directly tied together, as a hotter star is more likely to be brighter and would give off more light in the blue part of the visible spectrum, though it would still appear almost exactly like the Sun to the naked eye.<\/p>\n<p>Blue lurkers are a sub-set of blue stragglers \u2013 they also gained mass from a star, but they spin faster instead of being hotter and brighter. This makes this difficult to distinguish in a cluster like M67, as they blend in better with the other surrounding stars, hence the name \u201clurker.\u201d However, they are relatively rare \u2013 out of the 400 main sequence stars in M67, only around 11 are estimated to be \u201cblue lurkers.\u201d That puts the total, even in a space as congested as M67, at only around 3% of stars. Blue lurkers likely make up less than 1% of the general population.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Blue Stragglers - a stellar anomaly. What are they?\" width=\"1110\" height=\"624\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HxZNQDpizNE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A video explaining blue straggler stars.<br \/>Credit \u2013 Cosmos:elementary YouTube Channel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Since their evolutionary histories are likely to advance our understanding of the dynamics of the systems that created them, astronomers will spend more time analyzing these blue lurkers when they find them. Unique cases like WOCS 14020, where astronomers have a pretty good idea of the system\u2019s evolutionary history, are instrumental in that regard, and the paper, which was presented at the ongoing 245th American Astronomical Society meeting, was a step towards that greater understanding.<\/p>\n<p>Learn More:<br \/>STScI \u2013 NASA\u2019s Hubble Tracks Down a \u2018Blue Lurker\u2019 Among Stars<br \/>Leiner et al \u2013 The Blue Lurker WOCS 14020 : A Long-Period Post-Common-Envelope Binary in M67 Originating from a Mergerina Triple System<br \/>UT \u2013 Blue Straggler Stars are Weird<br \/>UT \u2013 A Rare Opportunity to Watch a Blue Straggler Forming<\/p>\n<div class=\"sharedaddy sd-block sd-like jetpack-likes-widget-wrapper jetpack-likes-widget-unloaded\" id=\"like-post-wrapper-24000880-170461-67892ef0e734d\" data-src=\"https:\/\/widgets.wp.com\/likes\/?ver=14.0#blog_id=24000880&amp;post_id=170461&amp;origin=www.universetoday.com&amp;obj_id=24000880-170461-67892ef0e734d&amp;n=1\" data-name=\"like-post-frame-24000880-170461-67892ef0e734d\" data-title=\"Like or Reblog\">\n<h3 class=\"sd-title\">Like this:<\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"button\"><span>Like<\/span><\/span> <span class=\"loading\">Loading&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"sd-text-color\"\/><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.universetoday.com\/170461\/colliding-stars-stellar-siphoning-and-a-now-a-blue-lurker-this-star-system-has-seen-it-all\/?rand=772204\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Triple star systems are more common than might be imagined \u2013 about one in ten of every Sun-like star is part of a system with two other stars. However, the&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":792745,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-792744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genaero"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=792744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/792745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=792744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=792744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=792744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}