Photo by University of California-Berkeley astronomers, from Keck Observatory
The tail of this rotating star is 50 billion miles long. The tail
is believed to be produced by two stars "engaged in a courtly
dance that generates cool dust and sprays it out in a spiral."
Click image for more pictures of Wolf-Rayet 104.

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Mauna Kea
telescope finds
mammoth star

Our solar system could
fit inside the head of the
rotating spiral giant

Candidate turns down top astronomy post

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

A rotating star with a spiral tail more than 50 billion miles long has been detected with the 10-meter Keck I telescope on Mauna Kea.

The discoverers describe it as rotating like a lawn sprinkler, Andrew Perala, observatory communications manager, said today.

"Our entire solar system would fit inside the head of this rotating creature," he said. "It's like a dog chases its tail sometimes. Our solar system would be in the head."

The discovery by University of California-Berkeley astronomers is reported in the science magazine "Nature," to be published tomorrow.

Using an advanced observing technique of interferometry, they obtained a detailed image of the star's tail and dust cloud instead of a blurry shape _ all they could see before.

They believe the tail is produced by "two hot stars engaged in a courtly dance that generates cool dust and sprays it out in a spiral."

"This is the first time they've ever seen anything like this," Perala said.

The technique pioneered by the UC-Berkeley astronomers allowed them to map the dust around the primary star, called Wolf-Rayet 104 or WR 104 _ one of a class of peculiar, hot, massive, luminous stars. William C. Danchi, principal investigator at UC-Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said the detailed image of Wolf-Rayet 104 is a feat equivalent to seeing details on the head of a pin two miles away.

Wolf-Rayet stars usually are three times larger and 25 times heavier than the sun, he said. They are 4,800 light years, or 28 million billion miles from Earth.

They're so bright that they are "literally flying apart," resulting in a dense, high-velocity stellar wind around the star, Danchi said.

He said WR 104 is unusual because it "smokes like a chimney," with the wind giving off infrared or heat radiation.

Perala said, "We seem to be fortunate to have a star, our sun, that is stable and not prone to freakish explosions of surface material that are frighteningly large."

He said the new technology is revealing stars "that are probably a lot more fantastic than anything you could imagine in a science fiction story."

Preliminary data seem to indicate the Earth's solar system "might be an aberration and other solar systems, weirder than we ever thought, are standard," Perala added.

But it's difficult to pin down what other solar systems might look like because their planets haven't actually been seen, he said.