Does
a Real-Life Death Star Exist?
No, I’m not talking about something from the movies.
That star would need to get close to a planet to destroy it. WR104, however,
has the potential to burn worlds from thousands of light years away. This is Wolf-Rayet
104 located in the constellation of Sagittarius about 2,222 parsecs away. Okay,
that’s about 8,000 light-years from us which may seem like a safe distance, but
consider that WR104 is 25 times the size of our sun, very dense, and much, much
hotter. Add to that mix the fact that this star is rotating rapidly and
expelling its gases creating a spiral around it; it is dying.
At this level of brightness the radiation field
around the star takes on a life of its own and plays a most unusual role; it
sheds off the outer atmosphere of the star by photon pressure. Therefore,
Wolf-Rayet stars are so luminous that they are literally flying apart! This
creates a high-velocity stellar wind surrounding the star which first grabbed
the attention of astronomers. Wolf-Rayet stars are very rare, only 230 have
been discovered, so far, in our Milky Way Galaxy. Of these stars, half of them
have a binary companion star which burns just as hot as the main star.
First discovered in 1998 by the Keck 1 Telescope,
this star was photographed, studied, measured, and cataloged. Scientists were
first taken by the size and beauty of this spiral image. They determined the
diameter to be 160AU (Astronomical Units), which is 160 times the distance from
Earth to the sun. Peter Tuthill, at the University of Sydney in Australia, has
been studying WR104 for years. He realized it rotated in a circle every eight
months and found one devastating fact: Earth looks down the axis of the system.
We are not looking at it from an angle, but dead-on, like looking down the
barrel of a rifle.
Another fact which concerns astronomers is that
WR104 is not a single star system, rather a binary system. It has another Class
OB star locked in orbit with it. As they circle one another, plumes of
streaming gas are driven from their surfaces creating a fiery, colorful
pinwheel in space. Astronomers fear the fuse for this star is very short; it
may explode within the next few hundred thousand years. When it does it may
emit an intense beam or ‘gamma ray burst.’ It is impossible to predict whether
or not it will actually create the dreaded gamma ray beam directed at Earth;
the exact outcome is still unknown. Some reports say, “Not to worry,” others
say, “Earth is in line with a death-star.”
I say, it’s a long time away; we have more important things to worry
about until then.
My Sources: Astro Dept. at University of Michigan,
nature.com/news, dailygalaxy.com, popsci.com, science.time.com,
universetoday.com, space.com, and en.wikipedia.org
