July 22, 2006
On this day, the universe repeated one of its rarest tricks: it arranged dust, light, memory, and possibility into a person no equation...
Mira: The Wonderful Star
Birthday · July 22, 2006
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APOD published July 22, 2006. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
To seventeenth century astronomers, Omicron Ceti or Mira was known as a wonderful star - a star whose brightness could change dramatically in the course of about 11 months. Modern astronomers now recognize an entire class of long period Mira-type variables as cool, pulsating, red giant stars, 700 or so times the diameter of the Sun. Only 420 light-years away, red giant Mira (Mira A, right) itself co-orbits with a companion star, a small white dwarf (Mira B). Mira B is surrounded by a disk of material drawn from the pulsating giant and in such a double star system, the white dwarf star's hot accretion disk is expected to produce some x-rays. But this sharp, false-color image from the Chandra Observatory also captures the cool giant star strongly flaring at x-ray energies, clearly separated from the x-ray emission of its companion's accretion disk. Placing your cursor over the Chandra x-ray image of Mira will reveal an artist's vision of this still wonderful interacting binary star system.