Astronomers have observed a white dwarf — a highly compact Earth-sized stellar ember — that is creating a colorful shockwave as it moves through space, leaving them searching for an explanation.
The highly magnetized white dwarf is gravitationally bound to another star in what is called a binary system. The white dwarf is siphoning gas from its companion as the two orbit close to each other. The system is located in the Milky Way about 730 light-years from Earth — relatively nearby in cosmic terms – in the constellation Auriga.
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
The shockwave – more specifically a bow shock – caused by the white dwarf was observed using the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Very Large Telescope. The shockwave was seen in an image released by the scientists glowing in various colors produced when material flowing outward from the white dwarf collided with interstellar gas.
“A shockwave is created when fast-moving material plows into surrounding gas, suddenly compressing and heating it. A bow shock is the curved shock front that forms when an object moves rapidly through space, similar to the wave in front of a boat moving through water,” said astrophysicist Simone Scaringi of Durham University in England, co-lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“The colours come from interstellar gas that is being heated and excited by the shock. Different chemical elements glow at specific colors when this happens,” Scaringi added.
In this shockwave, a red hue represented hydrogen, green represented nitrogen and blue represented oxygen residing in interstellar space.
A handful of other white dwarfs have been observed creating shockwaves. But all of those were surrounded by disks of gas siphoned from a binary partner. Although this white dwarf is siphoning gas from its companion, it lacks any such disk and is releasing gas into space for unknown reasons.
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