Using a massive telescope in South Africa, an international team of researchers has discovered eight of the hottest stars in the universe. The surface temperature of any celestial body is over 100,000 degrees. For comparison: on the surface of the sun “only” around 5800 degrees is reached.
The research team, led by Simon Jeffrey from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, which also included Professor Klaus Werner from Tübingen of the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, examined data from so-called subdwarfs. That’s what stars are called that grow into white dwarfs. “White dwarfs are about the size of Earth, but a million times heavier. They are the densest existing stars made of normal matter,” explains Werner.
Both subdwarfs and white dwarfs can have high surface temperatures. “Of the eight super-hot stars we detected, the hottest was a white dwarf with a surface temperature of 180,000 degrees.”
A hundred times brighter than the sun
According to astrophysicist Werner, each of the stars shines more than a hundred times brighter than the sun. However, they are all between 1,500 and 22,000 light-years from Earth, while the Sun is just over eight light-minutes away. So you can’t see the hot, bright dwarfs with the naked eye from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year.
Despite the distance, the discovery is important for the experts: “The results may also shed new light on the formation of our galaxy,” Werner explains. The results have been published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” and the measurements were made with the “Southern African Large Telescope” (SALT), which is located about 400 kilometers northeast of Cape Town.
Source: Krone
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