Coatlicue is the nickname given to a hypothetical star that was thought to be the reason for how the Sun (and among many other stars) came to be.
History[]
Coatlicue was first proposed by Matthieu Gounelle and Georges Meynet back in the 29th of August, 2012. This was because very little was known about the genealogy and the stellar environment of the Solar System. Short-Lived Radionuclides (SLRs) that were present in the Solar System's protoplanetary disk 4.56 billion years ago was suggested to provide some insight into the system's history, and making their origins understood.[1]
Iron-60, which was present in the early Solar System, was shown to have been produced by a diversity of supernovae that belonged to a first generation of stars located within a massive molecular cloud, with Aluminum-26 being delivered into a dense collected shell by a massive stellar wind belonging to a second generation of stars. Aluminum-26 yields used in the calculations by Matthieu and Georges, which were based on new rotating stellar models. Said models had aluminum-26 present in stellar winds during the main-sequence phase of a star, rather than it being in Wolf-Rayet phase. Eventually, the scenario brought up by Matthieu and Georges constrains the time sequence of the formation of the two stellar generations that proceeded the Solar System's formation, along with a number of stars during these two generations.[2]
This would lead to both Matthieu and Georges to propose a generic explanation for the past presence of SLRs in the early Solar System, based on a collect-injection-and-collapse mechanism occurring on a diversity of spatial and temporal scales. In that model, the presence of SLRs with a diversity of mean lifetimes in the protoplanetary disk could be the fossilized remains of sequential star formation within a hierarchal interstellar medium. In particular, they would show that the Sun was born together along with many other stars within a dense-collected shell situated over 5 to 10 parsecs (16.308 - 32.616 light years) from a massive parent star belonging to a cluster of ~1,200 stars.[3]
Characteristics[]
Coatlicue is thought to be a massive star, with a mass greater than 30 solar masses. If this is the case, then that likely puts it close to an O-Type star (mainly an O7V star), or a way more massive star, such as a Blue Supergiant.
Trivia[]
- It should be worth noting that Coatlicue is never actually referred to by name by the original proposers of the hypothesis. The name is more or less a nickname given to it.
- Coatlicue is also the name of Cōātlīcue, an aztec goddess thought to be the mother of the deities and the creator of the moon, stars and the god of the sun, Huītzilōpōchtli. This name was likely chosen due to Coatlicue itself being the star that gave raise to the Sun and among many other stars.