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Monday, August 22, 2016

Seven Sisters Stars Spin In Space

The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, is an open star cluster that contains a glittering population of searing-hot B-Type stars. The Pleiades, less colorfully termed Messier 45 or M45, is one of the closest star clusters to our own planet, and it is also the cluster that is most easily observed with the naked eye--especially during the winter months--as it sparkles in the clear, dark, and star-blasted night sky in the constellation Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is dominated by very hot, blue, and dazzling stars that were born within the last 100 million years--a mere wink of the eye on stellar time scales. In August 2016, a team of astronomers announced their intriguing and important new observations showing that, like cosmic figure skaters caught in a fantastic pirouette, the stars of the Seven Sisters cluster are spinning--however, these celestial ice-skaters are twirling around at different speeds!

M45 - The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters Imaged by Kevin D. and Jenna F. - Students of the Plymouth Community intermediate School
M45 - The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters Imaged by Kevin D. and Jenna F. - Students of the
Plymouth Community Intermediate School.

Astronomers for a very long time have wondered about what it is that determines the rotation rates of these sparkling stellar sisters. Now, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, during its second life as the K2 mission, has helped astronomers obtain the most complete catalog of rotation rates for the stars in a cluster. This important information can enable astronomers to gain a new understanding of where and how planets are born around these distant stars--and how stars evolve as they age.

Like the phoenix bird of Greek mythology, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope got a second chance at "life"--despite a crippling malfunction that brought its primary mission to an end in May 2013. Rather than giving up on the spacecraft, whose original mission was to discover how often Earth-like exoplanets occur within our own Milky Way Galaxy, a team of astronomers and engineers succeeded in developing a new strategy. The resulting second mission of this plucky spacecraft, re-named K2, not only continued Kepler's original search for distant Earth-like worlds in our Galaxy but also introduced some new opportunities for astronomers.

"We hope that by comparing our results to other star clusters, we will learn more about the relationship between a star's mass, its age, and even the history of its solar system," explained Dr. Luisa Rebull in an August 12, 2016, NASA Press Release. Dr. Rebull is a research scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. She is the lead author of two new papers and a co-author of a third paper about these findings, all published in the Astronomical Journal.

Twirling Sister Stars

The name of the Pleiades is derived from the ancient Greek, likely from Plein ("to sail") because of the cluster's importance during the sailing season in the Mediterranean Sea. However, the name eventually became mythologized as the name of seven divine sisters who were the daughters of Pleione--hence, the designation Pleiades--or, alternatively, the "seven sisters." Historically, the Pleiades were viewed as a group of "seven" sister stars: Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, and Pleione. It is generally thought that the name of the star cluster came first, and Pleione was created later in order to explain it.

The great Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first astronomer to observe the Pleiades through a primitive telescope, called a "spyglass,"--the first of its kind to be used for astronomical purposes. Galileo discovered that the cluster contains many stars that are far too faint to be observed with the naked eye. He published his observations, including a sketch of the Pleiades showing 36 stars, in his Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610.

The cluster radius has a core of approximately eight light-years and the tidal radius is about 43 light-years. The cluster itself hosts more than 1,000 statistically confirmed members. However, this figure excludes unresolved binary stars. It is also dominated by bright, young, hot blue stars, up to 14 of which can be observed with the naked eye depending on local observing conditions. The total mass contained in the cluster is estimated to be approximately 800 solar masses.

The Pleiades hosts many brown dwarfs, which are sub-stellar objects, frequently referred to as "failed stars", that sport less than approximately 8% of our Sun's mass. This basically means that brown dwarfs are not heavy enough for nuclear fusion reactions to occur in their cores, thus lighting their stellar fires. Therefore, puny little brown dwarfs are unable to attain true stardom status. Brown Dwarfs may account for up to 25% of the total population of the Pleiades--although they constitute less than 2% of the total stellar mass. Astronomers have made recent important discoveries in their efforts to detect and analyze brown dwarfs in the Pleiades, as well as in other youthful star clusters. This is because the youth of these sub-stellar objects render them bright and observable--while more elderly brown dwarfs, dwelling within older star clusters, have faded and grown very dim, making them considerably more difficult to observe and study.

The true age of a star can be calculated by comparing the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram Of Stellar Evolution for the cluster with theoretical models of stellar evolution. Using this technique, ages for the Pleiades of between 75 and 150 million years have been estimated. The widespread in estimated ages is the result of existing uncertainties in stellar evolution models.

Another way to calculate the true age of a star cluster is by studying its lowest-mass members. In common main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) stars--as still-"living" stars are categorized in the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram-- lithium is very quickly destroyed in nuclear fusion reactions. Little brown dwarfs--stellar "failures" that they unfortunately are--can nonetheless succeed in holding on to their lithium. Because of lithium's very low ignition temperature of 2.5 million Kelvin, the highest-mass brown dwarfs will go on to burn it eventually, and so determining the highest mass of brown dwarfs still containing lithium in the cluster can provide a clue of its age. Applying this particular technique to the Pleiades yields an age of approximately 115 million years.

The cluster is in the process of slowly making a journey in the direction of the feet of the Orion (The Hunter) constellation. Like most open clusters, the Seven Sisters will not stay gravitationally together forever. Some of the component stars will be unceremoniously evicted from the cluster as the result of unfortunate close encounters with other stars--and some will be stripped by tidal gravitational fields. Calculations indicate that the cluster will take approximately 250 million years to disintegrate, and gravitational interactions with giant, dark, and cold molecular clouds--the cradles of newborn stars--as well as with the spiral arms of our Milky Way, will also hasten the dispersion of the once-close sister stars.

Our own Sun is thought to have experienced a similar disruption of the sibling stars composing its own natal stellar family. Today our Sun is solitary, a lonely, searing-hot, brilliant, and roiling stellar inhabitant of our Milky Way Galaxy. However, it probably was not always so bereft of the company of others of its kind. Our Sun was likely born a member of a dense open cluster, along with thousands of other sparkling sister stars. Many astronomers think that the baby Sun was either rudely tossed out of its birth cluster or it simply wandered away from its sisters about 4.5 billion years ago. The long-lost, missing sisters of our Star have long since wandered away themselves to more distant regions of our Galaxy--and there very well may be as many as 3,500 of these nomadic stellar sisters of our Star.

Seven Sister Stars Spin In Space!

Because the Pleiades is one of the closest star clusters to Earth, it is the easiest to observe. It is located a mere 445 light-years away from our planet, on average, and the stars inhabiting the cluster--known individually as Pleiads--have reached stellar adolescence. At this youthful and active stage of their "lives", the stars are likely spinning as fast as they can--or ever will again.

As a typical young star evolves into stellar adulthood, it loses some of its vigors as a result of its copious emission of charged particles. Astronomers term these charged particles the stellar wind. However, when our Star's emission of charged particles occurs in our own Solar System, it is called the solar wind. The charged particles are taken for a ride on the star's magnetic fields, which generally exert a braking effect on the rotation rate of the young star.

Dr. Rebull and her colleagues delved deeper into the dynamics of stellar spin using Kepler. Because of the field of view on the sky, Kepler observed approximately 1,000 stellar inhabitants of the Pleiades over a 72-day time span. The telescope measured the rotation rates of over 750 stars in the Pleiades, including approximately 500 of the lowest mass, faintest, and smallest stellar runts, whose rotations could not be detected previously from ground-based instruments.

Kepler's measurements of starlight suggest the spin rate of a star by picking up small alterations in its brightness. These alterations are the result of "starspots" which, like the more-familiar sunspots that blemish our Sun's glaring face, form when magnetic field concentrations do not allow the normal release of energy at a star's surface. The affected regions grow to become cooler than their surroundings and appear to be dark in comparison.

As a star rotates, its starspots come in and out of Kepler's view, providing a new method for determining a spin rate. Unlike the small, sunspot blemishes that mark our middle-aged Sun, starspots can be enormous in stars as youthful as those twirling around in the Pleiades. This is because stellar youth is associated with greater turbulence and magnetic activity. These starspots trigger larger decreases in brightness, and also make spin rate measurements easier to obtain.

During the astronomers' observations of the Pleiades, a clear pattern began to show itself. The more massive stars tended to rotate slowly, while the less massive stars rotated rapidly. The massive-and-lazy stars' periods ranged from one to 11 Earth days. However, a large number of low-mass stars took less than a day to complete a single twirl. As a comparison, our own middle-aged, calm, and sedated Sun spins around completely only once every 26 days. The population of slow-rotating stars includes some ranging from a little bit larger, more massive, and hotter than our own Star, down to other stars that are somewhat smaller, less massive, and cooler. On the far end, the fast-rotating, swift, lowest-mass stars possess as little as a tenth of our Sun's mass.

"In the 'ballet' of the Pleiades, we see those slow rotators tend to be more massive, whereas the fastest rotators tend to be very light stars," Dr. Rebull continued to note in the August 12, 2016, NASA Press Release.

Dr. Rebull and her team propose that the primary cause of these differing spin rates is the internal structure of the individual stars. The larger and more massive stars contain an enormous core that is blanketed by a slender layer of stellar material that is experiencing convection. Convection is a familiar process to most people who have watched the circular swirls of boiling water in a pot. On the other hand, smaller, less massive stars, are made up almost entirely of convective, roiling regions. As the age of the star, this braking mechanism--derived from magnetic fields--more readily slows the spin rate of the outermost, slender layer of large, massive stars, in contrast to the comparatively turbulent and thick bulk of small, swift stars.

Because the Pleiades is close to Earth, astronomers suggest that it should be possible to unravel the complex interactions between stellar spin rates and other stellar properties. Those additional properties, in turn, can exert an important influence on stellar climates, as well as the habitability of any orbiting exoplanets that a given star may host. For example, as a dancing star's pirouette slows down, the generation of starspots also slows down, and the resulting stellar storms that go hand-in-hand with starspots become far less frequent. Fewer stellar storms result in less powerful and destructive blasts of radiation into space, so dangerous to orbiting planets and their potentially emerging delicate tidbits of budding life.

"The Pleiades star cluster provides an anchor for theoretical models of stellar rotation going both directions, younger and older. We still have a lot we want to learn about how, when, and why stars slow their spin rates and hang up their 'dance shoes,' so to speak," Dr. Rebull added.

Currently, Dr. Rebull and her team are analyzing the K2 mission data of an older star cluster, named Praesepe, which is more popularly known as the Beehive Cluster. The team of astronomers seeks to further study the phenomenon of stellar evolution and structure.

"We're really excited that K2 data of star clusters, such as the Pleiades, have provided astronomers with a bounty of new information and helped advance our knowledge of how stars rotate throughout their lives," explained Dr. Steve Howell in the August 12, 2016, NASA Press Release. Dr. Howell is the project scientist for the K2 mission at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Judith E. Braffman-Miller is a writer and astronomer, whose articles have been published since 1981 in various newspapers, magazines, and journals. Although she has written on a variety of topics, she particularly loves writing about astronomy, because it gives her the opportunity to communicate to others the many wonders of her field. Her first book, "Wisps, Ashes, and Smoke," will be published soon.

Judith E Braffman-Miller

Article Source: Seven Sister Stars Spin In Space
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