Where could be the origin for these bizarre objects? An international team of astronomers think that colliding white dwarf stars are to blame.
A white dwarf is the fate that awaits our Sun. After it uses up its hydrogen fuel, the star moves onto helium, ballooning up to become a red giant. But once it runs out of helium fuel, it doesn’t have the mass to move up the chain to carbon. Instead it collapses back down to a small dim object, called a white dwarf. Over the course of the next 25 billion years or so, it slowly cools down to the ambient temperature of the Universe.
But if two white dwarfs collide, they could create a new cloud of gas hot enough to start up nuclear reactions again. Two dead stars get another shot at nuclear fusion, briefly becoming a supergiant star again.
Original Source: Gemini News Release
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…
The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and…
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined…
You've seen the Sun, but you've never seen the Sun like this. This single frame…
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become ubiquitous, with applications ranging from data analysis, cybersecurity,…
The Search for Life in our Solar System leads seekers to strange places. From our…