Discover strange binary star systems in the universe

Astronomers have discovered a strange double star system in our Milky Way, in which a star is "eating meat" of its companion.

Discover the "cannibal" star in the universe

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley (USA) have observed strange binary star systems using the Hubble space telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory of the US Aerospace Agency (NASA ). They discovered that a star in the system was pulling matter from the other star.

Emission materials create a large disk around the two stars when the "re- release " process takes place, revealing the star's superheated helium core.

According to the research report published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the amount of material surrounding this dual star system is so large that experts cannot study them separately.

Instead, they can surmise the characteristics of the stars too, studying the surrounding gas disk.

The stripped star is called a Wolf-Rayet star. This is a star that is rapidly evolving, much larger than our sun, and is losing very fast external hydrogen layers, revealing extremely bright and superheated helium cores.

Wolf-Rayet stars can form in two ways, when a giant star emits its own hydrogen due to a strong solar wind or when a companion star uses gravity to deprive its material. . The newly discovered dual star system falls into the latter case and the Wolf-Rayet star is nicknamed " Nasty 1 ", following the first letters of the two astronomers who discovered it in 1963 - Jason Nassau and Charles Stephenson.

The process of " sucking " the material from NaSt1 does not work, causing a large amount of gas to be lost into a disk-shaped nebula around the double star system. This 3.2 trillion km nebula is thought to be only a few thousand years old and only 3,000 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers predict that, in the future, the cannibal carnivorous star may experience a series of explosions or meat-eating stars that could become supernovae.

Since more than 70% of giant stars are thought to be members of dual star systems , astronomers are interested in understanding the dual star system of NaSt1.