Every 2 minutes this star glows and the reason is unexpected

AR Scorpii way we are over 300 light years is a very strange star. And finally, science also answers why.

Beyond that vast universe, at the Scorpius constellation (Scorpius), 380 light years away, there is an extremely strange star. Star named AR Scorpii.

Where is it strange? Strange because it's not like the other stars, AR Scorpii is glowing every 2 minutes and then turns off. This flashing has led experts to suffer for more than 40 years since its discovery in the 1970s.

Picture 1 of Every 2 minutes this star glows and the reason is unexpected
AR Scorpii is actually two stars.

Then last year, a group of amateur astronomers found the truth. Using the Hubble telescope data, they discovered that AR Scorpii was actually . two stars. And they are dancing around each other with an extremely dizzying speed: an orbit of only 3.6 hours.

The couple has a white dwarf about the size of Earth, but the density is 200,000 times larger, and a red dwarf is one-third the size of the Sun.

According to them, it was the speed of the white dwarf's so fast rotation that the electrons received huge amounts of energy, which helped them almost reach the speed of light. This process has affected the other star, activating electromagnetic radiation pulses with light flashing with a cycle of 1.97 minutes.

Picture 2 of Every 2 minutes this star glows and the reason is unexpected
This is how they glow.

Thomas Marsh - researcher at the University of Warwick (UK) said: "The intensity of electrical impulses is unprecedented." In the past, similar electrical pulses appeared only in neutron stars - formed after other stars exploded.

However, although some experts had previously predicted that white dwarfs would emit similar electrical impulses, no one expected it to form such a monstrous binary star system.

Moreover, the experts also put up with the question: Where exactly are those electrons? Currently, all are assuming that they come from white stars, but there is no guarantee they are not created by the red dwarf.

According to Marsh : "Electrons with such a high energy level are quite unusual - because white dwarfs often do not have such high energy levels. But the impressive thing is that we are seeing a phenomenon. very new in the universe, when particles are horribly accelerated ".

In addition, Marsh shared that this finding shows that the universe still contains many mysteries, even those that no one has ever imagined.

The study is published in Nature.