A massive star, discovered by astronomers in the central region of the Milky Way, is surrounded by a very strange cloud of dense matter, the nature of which scientists were not able to unravel at once, writes the information resource ToDay News Ufa, which publishes material about a huge ice field in the center of our star cluster.
“We first assumed that the star at the center of an incredibly dense cloud is a faint supergiant that is approaching its final evolutionary point and is about to go supernova. But that very cloud (which, as it turned out a little later, is an ice field) is not typical for such old stars, so we began to study the strange star in more detail,”the scientists say.
According to them, dense clouds are satellites of young stars, that is, the existence of such an object in the vicinity of an old star is some kind of anomaly.
Indeed, further observations made it possible to understand what was the matter.
It turned out that the strange cloud is not a cloud at all, but an ice field located between the star and us, and thus blocking part of the star's light for an earthly observer.
Kolesnikov Andrey