Located at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). There is a group of dense stars around it. Due to the strong gravitational force of the black hole, the speed of nearby stars increases greatly. In such an environment, there is a lot of collision between stars. In the new study, it has been found in the results of these collisions that due to merger events in the stars near the center, sometimes the life of the stars increases unexpectedly.
Sainaasi Rose, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University who led the new research, says that the area near the center of the black hole is very dense with rapidly expanding stars, due to which the stars keep interacting with each other again and again. Researchers have investigated what happens to these stars.
Researchers found two major results in the collision of stars. The innermost core layer of stars is the hottest and densest, where nuclear fusion occurs. There are radiation and convective zones around it where energy comes out. The outer layer, the photosphere, is the visible surface of the star. With the fast movement of stars in the environment near the black hole, their outer layer gets eroded and their weight starts decreasing. Due to this, the inner layers become visible and sometimes the star starts appearing differently.
When the stars merge there, their cores merge, due to which the central mass and density of the new star increases. This results in a stronger gravitational compression of the core, which speeds up the rate of nuclear reactions. The result is that the star becomes hotter, brighter and even bigger than before. In such a situation, this new star appears to be young and recently formed, whereas before the merger the stars were much older.
In this way, due to the conflict of many stars, a kind of lottery is played and it seems that new life has come into them. But the life of these massive and merged stars is short because they burn their fuel very fast and die quickly.
With this study, scientists can deeply understand the process of evolution of the Galaxy. This also includes the interaction between the black hole and the galaxy. The study also reveals how supermassive black holes accumulate mass and how different the processes are in the star’s environment around them. This environment can also be a laboratory to test the theories of gravity.
,
Tags: Amazing news, Bizarre news, OMG News, Weird news
FIRST PUBLISHED: April 7, 2024, 16:48 IST
