Breathtaking image of a red giant star swallowing another star

[pesco]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/05/breathtaking-image-of-a-red-gi.html

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[Kevin_Slattery]

@pesco The URL for the ESO announcement is borked.

[pesco]

Fixed, thanks!

[SamWinston]

Looks like Motei country. (Mote country?)

[reallySorryAboutThat]

OM NOM NOM

[GulliverFoyle]

Star’s gotta eat.

[mike_isacson]

I saw this great IMAX film that features the ALMA observatory a few years ago, it’s definitely worth checking out.
https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-release/world-premiere-of-imax-3d-film-about-alma-and-vlt/

[byron_p]

Sadly, when stars fuck, like some insects, one of them dies. Ah, but the gloriousness of the offspring!

[Bozobub]

Wow, the astronomers who bagged this one really hit the jackpot; what a rare beastie!

[anon33176345]

[Richard_Kirk]

Mister Really Boring writes…

Erm, don’t want to spoil the fun, but actually it’s a radio telescope, and there’s no colour radio. My guess is they have made the red-shifted stuff red, and the blue-shifted stuff blue so we get an idea of the velocities, and they put the unshifted stuff in green (white might have been a better choice if we are approximating to what we see in the visible, but this is for info). So, you see the two polar jets, the two ‘tropic’ rings, and a cloud of stuff that is not going anywhere fast. Neat, but not trippy.

[euansmith]

Are you saying my star looks big in this?

[nixiebunny]

I work as an engineer on radio telescopes, although I only do single-dish work *(using an ALMA prototype antenna, no less!)

The typical result from a radiotelescope for each molecular line is a 4-D map of signal intensity and Doppler shift over a viewing area (measured in arcminutes) in some sky coordinate system, such as the galactic plane or right ascention and declination. A lot of information on the dynamics of the molecules can be derived from this dataset.

The colors of these images were most likely derived after a lot of number-crunching on the spectral data.

[Richard_Kirk]

True. However, the image looks very red, green, and blue to me, with few other shades, which suggests the colour coding isn’t sophisticated. Perhaps the depth data is really noisy so they have had to clean up the colours to show the basic shapes.

ALMA Antenna, eh? Ooo, fancy.