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Closely-Orbiting Stellar Companions Surrounded by “Mystery Dust”

Wednesday, November 14, 2012 13:40

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Artist’s concept showing a dust disk around a binary system containing a white dwarf and a less-massive brown dwarf companion. (P. Marenfeld and NOAO/AURA/NSF)

Even though NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft — aka WISE — ran out of coolant in October 2010, bringing its infrared survey mission to an end, the data that it gathered will be used by astronomers for decades to come as it holds clues to some of the most intriguing and hard-to-find objects in the Universe.

Recently astronomers using WISE data have found evidence of a particularly curious disk of dust and gas surrounding a pair of stars — one a dim brown dwarf and the other the remains of a dead Sun-sized star — a white dwarf. The origin of the gas is a mystery, since based on standard models of stellar evolution it shouldn’t be there… yet there it is.

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Read the rest of Closely-Orbiting Stellar Companions Surrounded by “Mystery Dust” (553 words)

© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: dust, post-common envelope, red dwarf, SDSS J0303+0054, stars, white dwarf, WISE