Stunning images of an unstable fusion reactor so vast it can only be kept in space. It’s not the next disaster movie (though they’re bound to run out of Earth landmarks son enough) but a glimpse of the far future: a sun-like star going through its death throes under observation by astronomers. Let’s hope they’ve got popcorn.
Chi Cygni is a wildly variable star: hundreds of light years away, it can range from visible with the naked eye to undetectable without a large telescopes, and it’s got a very good excuse for such unstable behaviour. It’s dying. Having expended its hydrogen core the star is now being crushed by the force of gravity. But stars don’t go quietly into the night, with the increased pressure and temperature triggering intense fusion reactions of other materials in areas around the core - blasting pieces of the star into space and creating an an extremely asymmetrical pulsating surface.
Chi Cygni is only five billion (plus a few hundred) years ahead of our own Sun - it’s at the point where it would have eaten Mars, had we been careless enough to live in a Chi Cygni-lar system instead of a solar one. Scientists of the Observatoire de Paris are studying the breakdown using the infra-red interferometric IOTA telescope in Arizona. The star will eventually explode, blasting off most of its outer mass into a nebula when the core collapses into a white dwarf.
It’s the ultimate in mortality; never mind men dying left and right, this is a spectacular study in how even the very symbol of life will violently expire. Though if man last long enough to deal with Sol’s slow death, we’ll be doing far better than we expect - in fact, if we even make it long enough to see Chi’s final death we’ll beat of the odds.
Luke McKinney
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