Multimedia Gallery
All images in this series
Two stars late in their mass-transfer evolution
Two stars having an initial mass ratio of q = 1.3 are shown late in their mass-transfer evolution. The more massive star (top) has transferred a significant fraction of its mass to its companion and the two stars are undergoing a catastrophic merger.
More about this Image
A team lead by Joel Tohline, professor of astronomy at Louisiana State University (LSU), uses computational fluid dynamics techniques to analyze how the structure of stars is altered by strong tidal forces in close binary star systems. Of particular interest is the situation when gas is tidally stripped from the surface of one star (the "donor") and falls directly onto the surface of the other star (the "accretor"). The ultimate fate of such mass-transferring binary star systems appears to depend on the ratio of the masses of the two stars (q = Mdonor/Maccretor) at the instant a mass-transfer event begins. In this set of images (and accompanying movie), the time-evolving structure of both stars is illustrated by rendering four nested isodensity surfaces: green/yellow identifies regions of highest mass-density; blue identifies regions of lowest mass-density.
The collaborative team at LSU includes: Mario D'Souza, Juhan Frank, Luis Lehner, Patrick Motl, and Jorge Pullin. Technical details about these simulations can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512137.
This research has been supported in part by grants AST-0407070 and PHY-0326311 from the National Science Foundation and grant NAG5-13430 from NASA, and in part by allocations of supercomputing time at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and at the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT) at LSU. (Date of Image: November 2003)A team lead by Joel Tohline, professor of astronomy at Louisiana State University, used computational fluid dynamics techniques to analyze how the structure of stars are altered by strong tidal forces in close binary star systems.
This research was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation grants AST 0407070 and PHY 0326311. Technical details about these simulations can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512137. (Date of Image: July 2005)
Credit: Patrick Motl, Mario D'Souza, Joel E. Tohline, and Juhan Frank, LSU
Images and other media in the National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery are available for use in print and electronic material by NSF employees, members of the media, university staff, teachers and the general public. All media in the gallery are intended for personal, educational and nonprofit/non-commercial use only.
Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation.
Additional information about general usage can be found in Conditions.
Also Available:
Download the high-resolution JPG version of the image. (1.9 MB)
Use your mouse to right-click (Mac users may need to Ctrl-click) the link above and choose the option that will save the file or target to your computer.