Researchers find stars in nearby galaxy are drawn to companions during their lifetime
Scientists studying a dwarf galaxy near to our own Milky Way have found evidence that massive stars are drawn together with “companion” stars during their lives, often with major impacts for both stars.
The international research team, including Keele’s Dr Jacco van Loon, studied massive stars with a low metallic content in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC); a dwarf galaxy which orbits the Milky Way and is around 200,000 light years away.
Studying stars like these can give researchers vital information about the formation of the Universe. This is something that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is currently being used to study further in the far reaches of the Universe, and the researchers in this study wanted to learn more about how these massive stars interact throughout their life cycles.
They were particularly interested in these interactions because how massive stars interact with one another can vastly affect their lifespan, and ultimately their final fate including the types of supernovae that are produced when they die.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), to study massive stars in the SMC, they found that almost half of them (45%) behaved in a way that showed they were part of a close binary system; that is to say, they were drawn together in pairs and interacted with each other continuously during their lifetimes. The findings are published in the journal Nature: Astronomy.
Dr Jacco van Loon, Director of Keele Observatory and Reader in Astrophysics, said: “When two massive stars orbit each other at close range, it will change them and their fate. These are also the systems that leave binary black holes or neutron stars, which can merge and generate the gravitational waves that have been detected since 2015.
“Knowing how common binary star interaction is, is very important to understand what is happening now but especially what happened in the young Universe when massive stars were more similar to the ones we find in the SMC galaxy."
