http://www.flickr.com/photos/facecrunch/536021503/

I’m not sure how that works though, as I always thought photons were massless and here they seem to have a gravity associated with them.

Gary 7

Age of both the stars are about same. (roughly) One of the pair, were to go over the tipping point of heavier elements to self annillation before the other did? (Say 1-10 year timespan overall.)

Could/would the affects of the change of magnetics, gravity, ect. cause a possible sympathtic/cascade type alteration of the second star, producing a greater yield/damage than the one star could by itself?

Lunatik

A magnificent discovery. This is a great time to live in.

Which begs the question: Will this wind… be so mighty… as to lay low… the mountains… of the Earth?

Hear hear! I get so sick of claims that aliens built Stonehenge or the Pyramids or Machu Picchu or the Nazca lines or Random Impressive Object X.

People are smart. People have always been smart. Now imagine a smart person in a world without TV, the Internet, or brain-dead spoon-fed entertainment of any kind.

What would this person do? Create. Invent. Organize. Build. What? Anything. Everything. All kinds of amazing things.

This is my standard response to those who claim that only aliens could have built Random Impressive Object X: bollocks. People are smart.

If we were directly receiving the stellar wind from these stars, we’d be getting cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles). The press release indicates that we’re not getting these charged particles; instead, they’re plowing into the interstellar gas medium, and the resulting shock-wave smashup is emitting gamma rays which we then see with GLAST.

Shocks and turbulent motion inside a bubble can efficiently transfer energy to cosmic rays, providing a plausible mechanism for particle acceleration. In size and location, the gamma-ray source resembles the so-called “blister” as reported by Whiteoak & Uchida 1997, where the bubble opens up and the wind expands into the low-density ambient medium. Shock acceleration at the boundaries of the blister may enable particles to diffusively re-enter into the dense medium, thereby interacting in hadronic collisions and producing γ-rays. Similar scenarios were outlined over twenty years ago for supernova-driven expansion of particles into a low density medium. If one accepts such a scenario here, it might give the first observational support of energetic gamma-ray emission due to diffusive shock acceleration from supersonic winds in a wind-blown bubble created by WR 20a, or by the ensemble of hot and massive stars in Westerlund 2.

Rule of thumb #420: nothing with the phrase “hadronic collisions” will be comprehensible to the lay reader. Nevertheless, the gist seems to be that the collisions of particles which would otherwise be counted as cosmic rays produces electromagnetic radiation in the gamma-ray part of the spectrum.

If I’m reading the story right, then “cosmic rays” in Prof. BA’s third paragraph after the Spitzer picture should actually be “gamma rays”.

I wonder how much this configuration has distorted the shapes of the stars? Would they be egg-shaped? And how did they get in there? Could they have coalesced in such close proximity, or did they form farther apart?

One point of confusion, though: the press release speaks of gamma-rays, but you (Phil) expound on cosmic rays. I thought they were different (EM vs. particle radiation, respectively). Is the binary system emitting both, or is this an accidental substitution of terms?

I wonder about how many rsuns they are, how far apart they are, how fast they travel relative to each other, If they’re blue or not (I’m assuming they are), what the distortions in space-time near them looks like because of their gravity… and of course the destructive kid in me wants to know what it will be like when they finish their main sequence and start fusing heavier elements… and what will happen eventually when one or both of them die! And I can try and imagine it from what I already know about stars but having two of these monsters right next to each other is just such an amazing situation that I want to hear all of you that know more about stars than me paint some pictures!

People are interested by things that are bigger and better!, (or in some fields, smaller and better!). Give us extremes! There are black holes, and then there are Super Massive Black Holes. There are stars, and then there are Two Giant Monsters in a Tight Binary System! HoooAhhhh!!!!

How soon can GLAST look at that system? I imagine all the science time for the first round has been scheduled so will it have to wait until the second call for proposals? Is there “director’s discretionary time” like on HST or a “pretty pictures” run?

This is precisely what makes astrophysics (or cosmology) so interesting. The universe is so big, that anything which can possibly happen, is happening somewhere. All we have to do is keep looking. The universe is our laboratory!