Exceptionally strong Balmer break (IMAGE)

Institute of Science and Technology Austria

Exceptionally strong Balmer break

Caption

Light from the nearby star Vega (left) displays a strong "Balmer break" -- the outer layers of the star efficiently absorb light below a characteristic wavelength (around 3646 A, dashed vertical line). Black Hole Stars (right) display star-like features such as Balmer breaks. These features are imprinted by their shrouds of dense gas that are in some ways analogous to the outer layers and winds of stars. At the same time, underscoring the unprecedented nature of Black Hole Stars, their star-like features tend to be extreme -- e.g., MoM-BH*-1 shows one of the deepest Balmer breaks ever observed (a ~7.7x drop in light across the Balmer break compared to ~2.6x for Vega).

Credit

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, DAWN JWST Archive, HST CALSPEC (Ralph Bohlin, Karl D. Gordon, P.-E Tremblay), JWST Mirage or Miracle Survey (PIs: Pascal Oesch, Rohan Naidu); Visualization: Rohan Naidu (University of Hawai’i)

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