Over a thousand light - year from Earth , there are two blank nanus , the ghostly remnants of wizard much like our Sun . But these stars are n’t ordinary white dwarfs , and their bizarre composition reveals a long , passive - aggressive history of reciprocally ascertain death .
Most clean dwarf are composed of carbon and atomic number 8 , the resolution of billions of years of complete burn away the original whiz ’s hydrogen and atomic number 2 fuel . And yet both of these asterisk are composed primarily of He , according to new research by Steven Parsons and Professor Tom Marsh of the University of Warwick . That ’s highly unusual , and it think something odd must have happened as these stars begin to die out and transition into being snowy dwarf .
What most belike happened is that the more massive of the two star was the first to die , and it began to dilate into a red supergiant much as our own Sun will five billion year from now . But its companion star did n’t give it enough elbow room to expand , pull off its outer hydrogen gasbag and stopping it the midst of its phylogenesis . Because of this , the star was leave as a husk of helium , and it tumble back into a helium white midget .
And then , in the cosmic eq of revenge , the freshly strike bloodless gnome did exactly the same matter to its familiar hotshot when it too began to dilate . Now the two are mesh in a quite literal death spiral , as their mutual orbits bring them closer and closer together . In about a billion years , the two stars will collide into each other and merge into a single star known as a hot subdwarf , which will run for about a hundred million years . And then , at long last , these two stars can die a natural death .
ViaAstrophysical Journal .
AstronomyAstrophysicsHeliumScienceSpaceWhite midget
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