Wolf–Rayet star

This amazing data led to the controversial claims that Cygnus X-3 was the first identified cosmic particle accelerator in the galaxy.

Cygnus X-3 is a binary system composed of a dying Wolf-Rayet star that feeds a close proximity neutron star, producing streams of superheated plasma.

And, and that kinda makes me wonder why, why it's called a, a Wolf-Rayet star, and we have all this ancient talk about, you know, the dog star Sirius and, uh, Anubis.

This ejecta is shot out at relativistic speeds very close to the speed of light.

These unimaginable beams, like cosmic searchlights, are held together by magnetic sheaths that produce powerful particle acceleration in a variety of frequency ranges, including X-rays, infrared, radio waves, and gamma rays.

We see huge O type stars, which are even more massive and hotter than B types.

We see incredibly luminous Wolf-Rayet stars.

Which are what exactly?

They're massive stars in a very specific, intense, windy phase of their evolution.

So-

The heavier O types are missing.

The Wolf-Rayet stars are missing.

Why would only the B type stars migrate inward?

What this team has done is get back in.

They used ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile for spectroscopy, they used ALMA, and they compared what they saw against models built for Wolf-Rayet stars.

the hot, stripped, fiercely windy stars that show strong carbon and helium signatures.

And that is what Sakurai's object now looks like.

The emergence of a WC star in Sakurai's object.

Astronomers write it in square brackets, which is the notation for the low-mass version.

It has the spectrum of a Wolf-Rayet star without being a massive star at all.

So the curtain is thinning.

One of the most massive and unusual young star clusters known in the Milky Way, packed with some of the rarest stars in existence.

Supergiants, hypergiants, and Wolf-Rayet stars, all crowded together in one relatively small region of space.

It is essentially a catastrophe waiting to happen.

several catastrophes actually.