Scientists have discovered evidence of a massive star from the early universe that does not fit our current understanding of the universe.
The ancient star-shaped strange ball that researchers have dubbed the “Barbenheimer Star” likely had a never-before-seen mixture of elements at its core—it later died a seemingly impossible death while giving birth to an equally surprising star in its place. new study shows. (The name Barbenheimer is a reference to the movies “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” which were released on the same day last year.)
Researchers uncovered traces of Barbenheimer’s Star after taking a closer look at J0931+0038, a distant red giant star. J0931 was first discovered in 1999 by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), one of the largest and most detailed astronomical databases of the night sky, but had not been properly analyzed until now.
In a new study uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on January 4, researchers turned SDSS telescopes in New Mexico toward J0931 and captured a detailed spectrum of the star’s light; this was later confirmed by follow-up observations from the Giant Magellan Telescope. in Chile. These spectra revealed that J0931 apparently has an extremely peculiar metallicity, or chemical composition, with an unusually high concentration of heavy elements. (These results have not yet been peer-reviewed.)
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Using newly obtained data, the research team pieced together how J0931 formed through a process known as stellar archaeology. This revealed that the star was born from the supernova remnant of a star 50 to 80 times more massive than the sun, dating back to 13 billion years ago, only about 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The metallicity of the parent star (Barbenheimer) was probably as peculiar as the metallicity of J0931 before the explosion; This would be completely different from other known stars in the early universe.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Alex Ji, an astrophysicist from the University of Chicago and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Whatever happened back then must have been amazing.”
The metallicity of J0931 was odd for three reasons. First, the star had unusually low levels of light elements such as magnesium, sodium and aluminum, which are normally found in greater abundance in stars. The latter had unusually high amounts of middleweight elements such as iron, nickel, and zinc. And finally, according to the researchers, there was an “excess” of heavier elements such as strontium and palladium.
“Sometimes we see one of these features at the same time, but we’ve never seen them all on the same star before,” said study co-author Jennifer Johnson, an astronomer at Ohio State University, in a statement.
Most stars have the inverse metallicity of J0931: They have higher levels of light elements and lower levels of intermediate and heavier elements. This is because stars are composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium, which combine in the stars’ cores to form heavier elements. These new elements, which are found in much smaller amounts, eventually turn into increasingly heavier elements.
Therefore, it is difficult to explain why J0931 has so many heavy elements because it does not appear to have a high enough concentration of light elements to form them.
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“Surprisingly, no existing model of element formation can explain what we see,” said the study’s co-author. Sanjana CurtisHe’s an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “It almost seems self-contradictory,” he said.
J0931’s unusual metallicity may be inherited in part from materials spit out by Barbenheimer’s Star when it exploded. This means that the parent star will likely have a similarly inverted metallicity. This is even stranger, the team said, because stars in the early universe should not have existed long enough to create such high concentrations of heavy elements.
But even stranger, Barbenheimer’s Star should never have gone supernova, the researchers wrote. Theoretically, a star with the mass predicted by Barbenheimer should have collapsed. black hole instead of exploding outward. Currently, the study team cannot explain why this collapse did not occur.
The only way for scientists to learn more about Barbenhaimer’s Star and its strange composition is to look for other similar stellar oddities in the early universe to uncover more pieces of this cosmic puzzle.
Co-author of the study: “The universe directed this movie, we are just the camera crew.” Keith Hawkinsan astronomer from the University of Texas at Austin said in the statement. “We don’t know yet how the story will end.”