Astronomers have captured the best-ever image of a star sucking the gas away from its bloated, dying companion.
The mechanics of stellar vampirism, however, proved less dramatic than astronomers anticipated. They expected to see hot gas funneling from a cool red giant star into a hot, dense blue star. Instead they saw mostly nothing.
The binary star system, called SS Leporis, likely uses a lesser-known method to send gas from one star to the other.
“For a long time this system was suspected as a typical example of star vampirism, but it’s more light and friendly than we would have loved to see,†said astronomer Jean-Philippe Berger of the European Southern Observatory and co-author of an upcoming study on SS Leporis in Astronomy Astrophysics.
Binary systems contain two stars orbiting a...
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