Sentences with phrase «accrete mass»

«Typically, when neutron stars accrete mass, this occurs every day or so,» Heyl says.

Not exact matches

This process, however, can not repeat indefinitely and the accreting star will reach a mass above which no physical pressure will prevent it from collapsing to a black hole.

As mass is accreted into one of the disks it loses gravitational energy.

[3] Type Ia Supernovae occur when an accreting white dwarf in a binary star system slowly gains mass from its companion until it reaches a limit that triggers the nuclear fusion of carbon.

Gaining a better understanding of how much mass black holes accrete may therefore provide new insight on how galaxies pack on the pounds, astronomers note.

Astrophysicist and co-author Lars Eric Hernquist of the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that a protostar could grow quickly, accreting about 10 solar masses within 1000 years, and reaching its full size of 100 or more times the sun's mass in as little as 10,000 years.

Those furious feeding rates still seem to defy the black holes» supermassive size: A 100 - solar - mass black hole accreting at the limit should take about 800 million years to reach a billion solar masses, even taking into account that it would eat faster as it grew.

In this theory material from the companion star is accreted onto the white dwarf until its mass reaches a limit, leading to a dramatic explosion.

Previous work had unified the variability in discs around black holes of different mass ranges, but by considering not just the mass of the object, but also its size, scientists can now add accreting white dwarfs and proto - stars to this unified picture.

The riddle posed by super-Earths (1 — 4 Earth radii, 2 — 20 Earth masses) is that they are not Jupiters: their core masses are large enough to trigger runaway gas accretion, yet somehow super-Earths accreted atmospheres that weigh only a few percent of their total mass.

The latest research shows that the relatively small OTS44 has a disk containing more than 10 times the mass of Earth, and that it is actively accreting material.

Building on past observations of the white dwarf called SDSSJ1043 +0855 (the dead core of a star that originally was a few times the mass of the Sun), which has been known to be gobbling up rocky material in its orbit for almost a decade, the team used Keck Observatory's HIRES instrument fitted to the 10 - meter Keck I telescope as well as data from the Hubble Space Telescope to measure and characterize the material being accreted by the star.

If the white dwarf accretes enough material to reach the Chandrasekhar limit, the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star (1.4 solar mass), it will likely explode as a Type Ia supernova.

If rate of accretion depends on the mass of the accreting body, then the rate of the increase in mass of that accreting body increases quickly until all available material is taken.