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Strange Star Spiral Offers Clues To Sun’s Fate
The spiral structure around the red giant R Sculptoris allowed astronomers to study the history of pulses of mass from the star.
CREDIT: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
An intriguing spiral structure surrounding a pulsing red giant star may be offering a preview of how the sun will behave at the end of its life.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, an international team of astronomers found the spiral structure, one never seen before, in the envelope of gas and dust around a red giant about 1,000 light-years from Earth and took a detailed three-dimensional reading of its composition.
The spiral is thought to be created from the gases being expelled by the dying red giant called R Sculptoris. The structure provides information about the velocity of the wind blowing off of R Sculptoris, revealing that the star has expelled three times as much mass as previously estimated.
that’s a secret Russian rocket once lost and now out of control… of course