Clear Views of Discs Around Stars |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Sunday, 04 December 2005 20:45 |
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A Chilean observatory has captured the clearest views so far of dusty discs surrounding both newborn and old stars.
Fabien Malbet of the Astrophysical Laboratory of Grenoble in France and his team used the light from two telescopes to study MWC 297 a newborn star about 800 light-years away. The telescopes were part of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), a telescope array run by the European Southern Observatory on top of Mount Paranal in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The VLTI contains a new instrument called AMBER, which combines light from either two of the three telescopes to create an instrument that effectively has the resolution of a telescope up to 90 metres in diameter.
The team found that the disc around MWC 297 extends from a distance about as long as the distance between the orbit of Mercury and the orbit of Pluto. Winds of about 600 kilometres per second emanated from the stars polar regions, while winds were about 70 kilometres per second near the disk.
Armando Domiciano de Souza and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany used AMBER to combine light from three telescopes so that they could take the closest ever look at the dusty disc around a bright supergiant 8000 light-years away that is nearing the end of its life. The team found that the disc is a flattened spear about half as wide as our Solar System along its longest axis.
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