14 DAY TRIAL // In a paper appearing in the November 25 issue of the esteemed scientific Nature, researchers announce they they were finally able to crack a 50-year-old mystery related to a very special class of pulsating stars.
Discovered in the 1960, Cepheid variable stars have always puzzled astronomers due to the fact that their weights cannot be easily measured. That is to say, only two methods of weighing these celestial bodies have thus far been developed.
Yet, rather than clearing the mystery, the methods only served to boost it. The two approaches, which both appeared to work in theory, produced significantly different results when applied to real cases.
As such, investigators sought out to determine which of the analysis method was producing the valid result and which was mistaking, and why. In a new investigation, they may have discovered the tools needed to do so.
Recently, astronomers discovered an interesting star system that could prove to be for this field what the Rosetta Stone was for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphic writings.
By analyzing the system in great details, experts could soon be able to say which of the two previous measurement methods was the one that produced valid results, Space reports.
One of the reasons why knowing so much about Cepheid variables is critical for space science is because they are among a distinct class of objects that can be used to determine distances between various points in the Universe.
The celestial bodies pulsate regularly, as they continuously switch between being either dim or bright. In the same cycle, the gas that they burn gradually becomes cooler, and the hotter, causing these stars to inflate or shrink according to a tight schedule.
“We have measured the mass of a Cepheid with an accuracy far greater than any earlier estimates,” explains astronomer Grzegorz Pietrzyński, who is the leader of a team of University of Warsaw in Poland researchers that conducted the investigation.
“This new result allows us to immediately see which of the two competing theories predicting the masses of Cepheids is correct,” he adds.
The group used the La Silla, Chile-based European Southern Observatory facility to find the object, which was discovered in the neighboring Large Magellanic Clouds, some 160,000 light years away.
The binary system, called OGLE-LMC-CEP0227, alternatively shows one of its stars passing in front of the other as seen from Earth, and vice-versa.