Astronomers see a young sun blowing bubbles inside the Milky Way

Astronomers see a young sun blowing bubbles inside the Milky Way

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

Earth and the rest of the Solar System’s planets live inside the heliosphere, a protective bubble inflated by the Sun’s winds. Other stars also have such bubbles, which astronomers call astrospheres.

Now NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured a very young Sun-like star inflating its bubble about 120 light-years away. Called HD 61005, this star has about the same mass and temperature as the Sun, but is only 100 million years old – our home star is about five billion years old.

Because HD 61005 is still in its infancy, it produces a strong solar wind that boosts the bubble. At the moment, the star’s astrosphere has a diameter equivalent to about 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun – not quite as large as the heliosphere.

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“We’ve been studying the Sun’s astrosphere for decades, but we can’t see it from the outside,” Johns Hopkins University astronomer Carey Lisse said in a statement. “This new Chandra result about the astrosphere of a similar star teaches us about the shape of the Sun and how it has changed over billions of years as the Sun evolves and moves through the galaxy.”

HD 61005 is surrounded by a lot of dense dust, which is a remnant of star formation. The star produces X-rays when its stellar wind hits the cooler interstellar medium surrounding the star. The sun may have experienced a similar stage of development in its infancy, say the researchers.

The observations were described in a paper that was posted on the preprint server arXiv.org and accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal.

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