Vampire Star Thats Absorbing its Companion Revealed by Scientists – Dual Dove

Not all the stars are bright and shiny. Some of them are thieves. And they get away with it, as no law can punish a star for stealing her partner s gas. Commonly known as a vampire star, this one is a dwarf that only passes by as a star. They are either white or brown, depending on the hydrogen fusion in the core. They live in concubinage with other stars, and the partnership is called a binary system.

The Kepler space telescope caught in the act a binary star system made of a brown dwarf. A brown dwarf is an object that didnt reach the actual point of becoming a star. It started to form like a star, but couldnt accrete enough mass.

As weird as it might sound, it is a failed star incapable of igniting by herself. The little brown space object pretended to be a real star for 30 days back in 2016. The photos were revealed recently by accident.

The binary star system is 3000 light-years away, and the cataclysmic variable star fooled around, thinking no one would notice that the 30 days brightening was a huge pretense. The star didnt become 1600 times brighter by herself, and it is a vampire, ten times smaller than her partner.

How does this happen? The material swirling around the bigger star in the accretion disc generates intense heat. The heat is so extreme that it becomes incandescent. But, after the 30 shinning days, the vampire became what it really is: a vaguely bright space object.

Some scientific goods came out of it. Even though Kepler Space Telescope was there to achieve data about exoplanets, extreme energetic events such as core-collapse supernovae, and neutron star collisions, it proved to be able to exceed its original parameters. So, the data gathered by it can be extended to the one from TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

Ethelene is the main editor on DualDove, she likes to write on the latest science news.

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Vampire Star Thats Absorbing its Companion Revealed by Scientists - Dual Dove

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero