The planetary nebula (PN) stage is the ultimate fate of stars with mass 1 to 8 solar masses (M⊙). The origin of their complex morphologies is poorly understood, although several mechanisms involving binary interaction have been proposed. In close binary systems, the orbital separation is short enough for the primary star to overfill its Roche lobe as it expands during the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase. The excess material ends up forming a common-envelope (CE) surrounding both stars. Drag forces would then result in the envelope being ejected into a bipolar PN whose equator is coincident with the orbital plane of the system. Systems in which both stars have ejected their envelopes and evolve towards the white dwarf (WD) stage are called double-degenerates. Here we report that Henize 2–428 has a double-degenerate core with a combined mass unambiguously above the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 M⊙. According to its short orbital period (4.2 hours) and total mass (1.76 M⊙), the system should merge in 700 million years, triggering a Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) event. This finding supports the double-degenerate, super-Chandrasekhar evolutionary channel for the formation of SNe Ia.
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Dark matter is an invisible substance that makes up more than eighty percent of the matter content of the universe. We know of its existence due to its gravitational influence, being a key ingredient to understand everything from the large-scale evolution of the universe to the formation of galaxies like the Milky Way, of which we are part of . However, very little is known about its nature, which constitutes one of the greatest unsolved problems in contemporary physics. The fuzzy dark matter model has recently been studied as a promising candidate. In this model , it is postulated that dark
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Accretion disks around compact objects are expected to enter an unstable phase at high luminosity. One instability may occur when the radiation pressure generated by accretion modifies the disk viscosity, resulting in the cyclic depletion and refilling of the inner disk on short timescales. Such a scenario, however, has only been quantitatively verified for a single stellar-mass black hole. Although there are hints of these cycles in a few isolated cases, their apparent absence in the variable emission of most bright accreting neutron stars and black holes has been a continuing puzzle. Here
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H II regions are ionized nebulae associated with the formation of massive stars. They exhibit a wealth of emission lines in their spectra that form the basis for estimation of chemical composition. The amount of heavy chemical elements is essential to the understanding of important phenomena such as nucleosynthesis, star formation and chemical evolution of galaxies. For over 80 years, however, a discrepancy exists of a factor of around two between heavy-element abundances (the so-called metallicity) derived from the two main kinds of emission lines that can be measured in nebular spectra
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