Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly lopsided disk surrounding the nearby mysterious star Beta Canis Majoris, thanks to a brand new ‘photonic lantern’ device that could significantly improve the observation capabilities of ground-based telescopes.
Beta Canis Minor, also known as Gomeisa, is about 3.5 times the mass of the Sun and is located about 162 light-years from Earth in the constellation Canis Minor, where it is visible to the naked eye at night. Despite its relative proximity to Earth, researchers still don’t know much about it. For example, past studies have suggested that this is a close binary system consisting of two small stars orbiting each other in close proximity, but this has not yet been confirmed.
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“We did not expect to detect such an asymmetry, and explaining its existence will be a challenge for astrophysicists modeling these systems,” study lead author Yoo Jung Kim, a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement.
But what really excites the research team is that the new device achieved an extremely high level of detail during first use. They believe this small instrument has captured “the clearest measurements yet of a disk around a star” taken by a single ground-based telescope.
Photonic lanterns can be attached to almost any optical observatory grade telescope. It works by extracting light from an object and splitting it into individual bundles. “It is similar to dividing a chord into individual notes,” the researchers said in a statement. Each strand is then further separated into wavelengths, like the colors of a rainbow, and then special computer software is used to recombine the individual bits of information.
This process allows astronomers to partially circumvent a major limit in visual astronomy known as the “diffraction limit.” Diffraction limits are caused by subtle variations that occur across multiple wavelengths as light passes through Earth’s atmosphere. The new device allows researchers to see “subtle details that would otherwise be lost,” Kim said.
In this case, the lanterns allowed the team to more precisely measure subtle color changes in the star’s gas disk caused by the Doppler effect, a change in the frequency of waves due to the relative motion of the source and observer. Half of the disk is colored blue because it is rotating toward us, and the other half is colored red because it is moving away from us. However, the color changes on each side of the star are not completely consistent. This means that the gas is not rotating in a perfect disk.
Typically, this kind of insight is only available at space-based assets like the James Webb Space Telescope, without having to deal with atmospheric disturbances or by stacking multiple images from different ground-based telescopes. But photonic lanterns can boost the power of a single ground-based telescope, so comparable results can be achieved, the researchers said.
“In astronomy, the sharpest image details are usually obtained by linking telescopes together,” Kim said. “But we did it with one telescope.”
The researchers will now use the new instrument to study other astronomical objects and attach it to other telescopes to see if they can replicate the same level of observational power.
“We are just getting started,” study co-author Nemanja Jovanovic, an astronomer and photonics expert at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. “The possibilities are really exciting.”
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