Scientists marvel at 'tail' of speeding star by Delia Cruceru

On Wednesday NASA announced that Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex) space telescope discovered that a star which they were studying for a long time has a cometlike tail. The scientist declared that is the first time they ever saw that around a star. "I was shocked when I first saw this completely unexpected humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star," said Christopher Martin of the California Institute of Technology, principal scientist for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft. The star is known as Mira and scientist were studying it from 400 years ago, but the tail was spotted by Galex because features surrounding Mira are visible just in ultraviolet light. That's why other observatories haven't spot the enormous tail before. If they will be able to study the trail, it could offer information about how stars like the sun die and then give birth to other stars. The star from the constellation Cetus it's about 350 light-years distance from Earth and has a huge comet-like tail composed of carbon, oxygen and other elements shed from the star. NASA researchers said that Mira it's a slowly dying star, billion of years ago it would have been compared to our Sun. The tail has been ejecting over 30.000 years ago. The telescope discovered that the star has in front a "bow shock" believed to be hot gas that creates the ultraviolet tail.

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20070815/tsc-us-space-astronomy-e123fef_1.html

by Delia Cruceru for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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