00:02Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe HD 61005
00:10For the first time, astronomers have seen a bubble around a star that is similar in size and mass to
00:16our Sun, but much younger.
00:18This discovery, made using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, teaches astronomers about what might have been happening on our own
00:26Sun billions of years ago.
00:28The discovery of this bubble, which astronomers call an astrosphere, was made around the star named HD 61005.
00:37This star is about 120 light-years from Earth.
00:41Where does this astrosphere come from?
00:44Winds from the star's surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot gas as it expands into
00:50much cooler gas and dust surrounding the star.
00:53Our Sun has a similar bubble, called the heliosphere.
00:57Scientists are interested, not only in how the heliosphere works today, but also in how it behaved in the past.
01:05The discovery of the astrosphere around HD 61005 gives them a window into our younger Sun.
01:13HD 61005 is only about 100 million years old, compared to the Sun's age of about 5 billion years.
01:21Because it is so young, HD 61005 has winds of particles blowing from its surface that are hundreds of times
01:29stronger than the wind from the Sun.
01:31This is the first full view of an astrosphere that astronomers have obtained around a star like the Sun.
01:37For a few decades, astronomers have been trying to get an image of an astrosphere.
01:43Up until now, they were only able to capture images that were just a single point of light, and didn't
01:49give any information on the structure of the astrosphere itself.
01:53Chandra was finally able to detect the astrosphere around HD 61005 because it is producing X-rays, as the stellar
02:01wind runs into cooler dust and gas that surrounds the star.
02:04It required an X-ray telescope with the sharp vision of Chandra, plus a long enough observation time, to collect
02:11the data to make this discovery.
02:15Previously, astronomers had nicknamed HD 61005 the Moth because of the large amounts of dust in a disk around the
02:23star that you can see in infrared data, which gives it the appearance of the insect.
02:29This disk formed when rocks and icy bodies left behind after the star collided together, which is where the Kuiper
02:36Belt in our own solar system came from.
02:39Because the strong wind should be blowing dust in the disk away from the star, the dust that makes up
02:44the Moth-like structure around HD 61005 either does not last very long or is continually replenished by an unseen
02:52massive disk that keeps stirring itself to create more dust grains.
02:56This is something that astronomers will continue to investigate.
03:00While you won't be able to see all the things that Chandra and the other telescopes in space can, you
03:05can spot it with binoculars if you know where to look.
03:07People care.
03:21Classroom
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03:26You
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