Pulsating star mystery solved in rare alignment of Cepheid variable and another star

By discovering the first double star where a pulsating Cepheid variable and another star pass in front of one another, an international team of astronomers has solved a decades-old mystery. The rare alignment of the orbits of the two stars in the double star system has allowed a measurement of the Cepheid mass with unprecedented accuracy. The new result shows that the prediction from stellar pulsation theory is spot on, while the prediction from stellar evolution theory is at odds with the new observations.

The new results, from a team led by Grzegorz Pietrzynski (Universidad de Concepción, Chile, Obserwatorium Astronomiczne Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Poland), appear in the Nov. 25, 2010 edition of the journal Nature.

Grzegorz Pietrzynski introduces this remarkable result: "By using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, along with other telescopes, we have measured the mass of a Cepheid with an accuracy far greater than any earlier estimates. This new result allows us to immediately see which of the two competing theories predicting the masses of Cepheids is correct."

Classical Cepheid Variables, usually called just Cepheids, are unstable stars that are larger and much brighter than the Sun [1]. They expand and contract in a regular way, taking anything from a few days to months to complete the cycle. The time taken to brighten and grow fainter again is longer for stars that are more luminous and shorter for the dimmer ones. This remarkably precise relationship makes the study of Cepheids one of the most effective ways to measure the distances to nearby galaxies and from there to map out the scale of the whole Universe [2].

Unfortunately, despite their importance, Cepheids are not fully understood. Predictions of their masses derived from the theory of pulsating stars are 20% less than predictions from the theory of the evolution of stars. This embarrassing discrepancy has been known since the 1960s.

To resolve this mystery, astronomers needed to find a double star containing a Cepheid where the orbit happened to be seen edge-on from Earth. In these cases, known as eclipsing binaries, the brightness of the two stars dims as one component passes in front of the other, and again when it passes behind the other star. In such pairs astronomers can determine the masses of the stars to high accuracy [3]. Unfortunately neither Cepheids nor eclipsing binaries are common, so the chance of finding such an unusual pair seemed very low. None are known in the Milky Way.

Wolfgang Gieren, another member of the team, takes up the story: "Very recently we actually found the double star system we had hoped for among the stars of the Large Magellanic Cloud. It contains a Cepheid variable star pulsating every 3.8 days. The other star is slightly bigger and cooler, and the two stars orbit each other in 310 days. The true binary nature of the object was immediately confirmed when we observed it with the HARPS spectrograph on La Silla."

The observers carefully measured the brightness variations of this rare object, known as OGLE-LMC-CEP0227 [4], as the two stars orbited and passed in front of one another. They also used HARPS and other spectrographs to measure the motions of the stars towards and away from the Earth -- both the orbital motion of both stars and the in-and-out motion of the surface of the Cepheid as it swelled and contracted.

This very complete and detailed data allowed the observers to determine the orbital motion, sizes and masses of the two stars with very high accuracy -- far surpassing what had been done before for a Cepheid. The mass of the Cepheid is now known to about 1% and agrees exactly with predictions from the theory of stellar pulsation. However, the larger mass predicted by stellar evolution theory was shown to be significantly in error.

The much-improved mass estimate is only one outcome of this work, and the team hopes to find other examples of these remarkably useful pairs of stars to exploit the method further. They also believe that from such binary systems they will eventually be able to pin down the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud to 1%, which would mean an extremely important improvement of the cosmic distance scale.

Notes

[1] The first Cepheid variables were spotted in the 18th century and the brightest ones can easily be seen to vary from night to night with the unaided eye. They take their name from the star Delta Cephei in the constellation of Cepheus (the King), which was first seen to vary by John Goodricke in England in 1784. Remarkably, Goodricke was also the first to explain the light variations of another kind of variable star, eclipsing binaries. In this case two stars are in orbit around each other and pass in front of each other for part of their orbits and so the total brightness of the pair drops. The very rare object studied by the current team is both a Cepheid and an eclipsing binary. Classical Cepheids are massive stars, distinct from similar pulsating stars of lower mass that do not share the same evolutionary history.

[2] The period luminosity relation for Cepheids, discovered by Henrietta Leavitt in 1908, was used by Edwin Hubble to make the first estimates of the distance to what we now know to be galaxies. More recently Cepheids have been observed with the Hubble Space Telescope and with the ESO VLT on Paranal to make highly accurate distance estimates to many nearby galaxies.

[3] In particular, astronomers can determine the masses of the stars to high accuracy if both stars happen to have a similar brightness and therefore the spectral lines belonging to each of the two stars can be seen in the observed spectrum of the two stars together, as is the case for this object. This allows the accurate measurement of the motions of both stars towards and away from Earth as they orbit, using the Doppler effect.

[4] The name OGLE-LMC-CEP0227 arises because the star was first discovered to be a variable during the OGLE search for gravitational microlensing. More details about OGLE are available at: http://ogle.astrouw.edu.pl/.

Enigma of missing stars in local group of galaxies may be solved

In the local group of galaxies that also includes the Andromeda Nebula and our Milky Way, there are about 100 billion stars. According to astronomers' calculations, there should be many more. Now, physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland may have found an explanation for this discrepancy.

Their study will appear in the upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

New stars are born in the Universe around the clock -- on the Milky Way, currently about ten per year. From the birth rate in the past, we can generally calculate how populated space should actually be. But the problem is that the results of such calculations do not match our actual observations. "There should actually be a lot more stars that we can see," says Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg, astrophysicist at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie of the University of Bonn.

So, where are those stars?

For years, astronomers worldwide have been looking for a plausible explanation for this discrepancy. In cooperation with Dr. Carsten Weidner from St. Andrews University, Dr. Pflamm-Altenburg and Professor Dr. Pavel Kroupa, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Bonn, may now have found the solution. It seems that so far, the birth rate has simply been overestimated. But this answer is not quite as simple as it sounds. Apparently, the error of estimation only occurs during periods of particularly high star production.

The reason for this lies in the manner in which astronomers calculate the birth rate. "For the local Universe -- i.e., the Milky Way as our home and the adjacent galaxies -- it is relatively simple," explains Professor Kroupa. "Here we are able to count the young stars one by one, using huge telescopes."

The problem with this method is that it only works for our immediate vicinity. But many galaxies are so distant that even the best telescope simply overlooks their small stars. As luck would have it, however, occasionally there is an especially large whopper among the newbie's in the sky. Such a star will, even if it cannot be directly discovered as an individual star, leave its traces in the light of even the farthest galaxies. The number of large whoppers then determines the strength of this trace.

In our immediate vicinity, these large whoppers occur with a fixed probability. There are always about 300 lightweights to one "big star baby." This numerical ratio seemed to be universal. So it was sufficient for astronomers to know the number of the large whoppers, for this allowed them to determine the number of new-born stars by simply multiplying the former number by a factor of 300.

Population explosion in space

Recently, however, some Bonn astronomers around Professor Kroupa began doubting the fixed ratio. Their hypothesis is that at times when the galactic nurseries are booming, they generate a considerably higher number of stellar heavies than normal. The reason for this, according to this theory, is so-called stellar crowding. For stars are not single children; they are born in groups, as so-called star clusters. At birth, these clusters are always of a similar size -- no matter whether they contain 100 star embryos -- or 100,000.

Consequently, at times of a high birth rate, space can be at a premium in star clusters. Astronomers call such galaxies that are particularly rich in mass "ultra-compact dwarf galaxies," or UCD's for short. In these, things are so tight that some of the young stars fuse during formation. Thus, more stars rich in mass than normal emerge. The "small to large" ratio is then only about 50 to 1. "In other words, we used to estimate the number of newly formed small stars by far too high," explains Dr. Carsten Weidner.

The researchers from Bonn and St. Andrews have now corrected the birth rates according to the projections of the stellar crowding theory. With an encouraging result -- they actually arrived at the number of stars that can be seen today.