Discovered the 'predatory' star

The light erupts as the white dwarf sucks matter from its nearby brown dwarf recorded by the Kepler Space Telescope.

Astronomers discovered the sudden glow of a "vampire star" based on data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope. This is one of the rarest types of supernovae, not as intense as the supernova explosion, but it still helps researchers understand star behavior. A new planet occurs when a white dwarf and another star orbit very closely together. The density of a white dwarf makes its gravity strong enough to attract matter from the other star.

Brown dwarfs become a source of feeding for white dwarfs.(Photo: IFL Science).

Dr. Ryan Ridden-Harper of the Australian National University shared his findings as an unusual new planet called dwarf new planet WZ Sge . White dwarfs do not absorb matter from normal stars but brown dwarfs , objects that lie in the layer between the big planet and the star. Brown dwarfs are too small to trigger fusion.

Brown dwarfs may be tiny compared to normal stars, but their hydrogen is no less abundant than any other star. When the accretion disk formed from matter attracted by a white dwarf is dense enough, the resulting fusion reaction produces a powerful flash. The Southern European Observatory calls white dwarfs revived from the dead after "eating companions" as vampire stars .

Kepler's mission is to find stars that reduce light as the planets pass through their surfaces, but with the ability to track brightness with precision far above ground-based telescopes, Kepler also helps researchers. close to the stars nearby. Many researchers create algorithms to filter information about the increase in the star's brightness in the Kepler field of view, but Ridden-Harper focuses on sudden flare events.

"Data from Kepler reveals a 30-day cycle in which dwarf supernovae rapidly light up 1,600 times and then darken very quickly and gradually return to normal brightness. The accretion disk reaches a temperature of 11,700 degrees Celsius at peak of the outbreak, " said Ridden-Harper. The companion star is too faint to observe, but in a report published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Ridden-Harper calculates its mass from the orbital period of a white dwarf. The results help confirm that it is a brown dwarf.