The two stars are called LH54-425. One star is about 62 times as massive as our Sun, while the other one is about 47 times the Sun’s mass.

To show the size of these two stars once they combine into one SuperStar: The largest star system in the Milky Way galaxy is the Eta Carinae binary system. It is about 100 to 150 times larger in mass than the Sun. Eta Carinae is about four million times brighter (luminous) than the Sun. The system is located in the constellation Carina, which is about 7,750 light-years from the Sun. Eta Carinae is known for its giant explosion in 1843 when it produced as much visible light as a supernova explosion. Instead of being destroyed, however, it survived—what is called a supernova impostor event (SIE).

The LH54-425 system is about 165,000 light-years from the Sun. It is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way galaxy. The young system is less than three million years old.

NASA scientist George Sonneborn, one of the researchers using NASA’s FUSE orbiting telescope and ground-based telescopes to study the LH54-425 system, says that the two stars have been classified as “O stars”, which are the most luminous and massive types of known stars in the universe. According to Sonneborn, these two stars could look similar to Eta Carinae in about one million years.

An average O-star is about 50 times as massive as the Sun and can be tens of thousands times more luminous than the Sun. They have short life spans when compared to other stars and are very rare—with only one star in ten million stars are classified as O-stars. However, bcause they are so much brighter than the average star, O-stars are observed more frequently than most other types of stars.

U.S. astronomers Stephen Williams and Douglas Gies have used the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile as one of the ground-based telescopes for observation of the LH54-425 star system. They found that the two stars are about one-sixth the average distance between the Earth and the Sun—about 15.2 million miles (24.5 million kilometers) apart. Because the stars are so close together, the expelling of material from each star will eventually allow them to merge into one star as they grow older and become larger.

Each star expels a large and powerful stellar wind. The larger of the two stars expels 500 trillion tons of material per second. This rate is about 400 times the rate of material loss from the Sun. The smaller star expels material at about one-tenth the rate of its bigger brother. When these two winds collide, they produce superheated gases that emit x-rays and far-ultraviolet radiation. The FUSE satellite is well equipped to measure the properties of these two stellar winds and the combined collision they produce.

FUSE, or Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, is a space telescope that is operated by The Johns Hopkins University. It was launched from a Delta II rocket on June 24, 1999, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It is positioned in low-Earth orbit, about 475 miles above the Earth. FUSE is designed to observe radiation in the far ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Far ultraviolet radiation has a wavelength of 90.5 to 119.5 nanometers, where one nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter. Its three-year mission has been extended, and, currently, over 400 scientific research papers have been written with data from FUSE.

The FUSE spacecraft, also classified as Explorer 77, is also operated and maintained with help from the University of Colorado (Boulder), University of California (Berkeley), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and French Space Agency (CNES). It is a part of the Origins program at NASA’s Office of Space Science.

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Astronomy  NASA  Physics  Research  Science  William Atkins