They will likely merge in a cataclysmic event some 18 billion years from now.
The new discovery was outlined in a study, published in the journal
"This binary star is the most massive contact binary observed so far," study co-author Daniel Pauli, a Ph.D. student at the University of Potsdam, explained in a statement. "The smaller, brighter, hotter star, 32 times the mass of the Sun, is currently losing mass to its bigger companion, which has 55 times our Sun’s mass."The scientists used computer models and compared them to their real observations.
“Our best-fit model suggests these stars will merge as black holes in 18 billion years," Rickard continued. "Finding stars on this evolutionary pathway so close to our Milky Way galaxy presents us with an excellent opportunity [to] learn even more about how these black hole binaries form.”Context: Most massive stars are believed to be born in close binary systems where they can exchange mass, which impacts the evolution of both binary components.
Methods: We were able to derive reliable radial velocities of the two components from the multi-epoch data, which were used to constrain the orbital parameters. The spectroscopic data covers the UV, optical, and near-IR, allowing a consistent analysis with the stellar atmosphere code, PoWR. Given the stellar and orbital parameters, we interpreted the results using binary evolutionary models.
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