An odd new species of star known as old smokers hovers around doing nothing for a while before suddenly erupting in clouds of smoke.
While calling someone a “old smoker” is not a complimentary term for anyone, it does apply to the recently identified category of stars whose last stages are marked by prolonged periods of silence followed by clouds of black smoke.
According to AFP, astronomers announced on Friday that they had found this unusual new kind of star concealed deep within the Milky Way. The worldwide scientific team responsible for the finding did not search for such old stars during their ten-year survey. They were searching for protostars, or young stars, which regularly burst into stardom, with the VISTA telescope in Chile.
They discovered 32 such newborn stars, which the researchers described as the “largest number anyone has ever found before in one batch.” But in the background was a “nice surprise” a lot more interesting — an old smoker puffing away in a densely packed and metal-rich region at the centre of the Milky Way called the Nuclear Stellar Disc.
The researchers discovered stars that were just doing nothing at all for extended periods before becoming 40 to 100 dimes dimmer, making them so faint they could barely be spotted by the telescope’s infrared vision. Then, some years later, they would return to their former brightness without any warning. The scientists propose that this is caused by stars throwing off puffs of smoke, even though they do not fully understand the reasons.
The leading theory is that the star’s brightness is temporarily obscured by puffs of smoke. This also makes sense since there are many more heavy elements in that region of the galaxy, which could create more dust in the star’s atmosphere. If the theory is correct, the amount of puffed out by the stars could help explain how heavy elements spread through the galaxy and beyond.
