Cannibalistic star discovered in the universe

Astronomers have discovered a strange binary star system in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy, in which one star is "eating" its companion.

Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) observed the strange double star system using the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. They discovered that one star in the system is pulling material from the other star.

The emitted material creates a large disk around the two stars as the cannibalization proceeds, revealing the super-hot helium core of the cannibalized star.

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

Instead, they can infer the properties of stars by studying the surrounding gas disk.

The stripped star is called a Wolf-Rayet star. It is a rapidly evolving star, many times larger than our sun, that is rapidly losing its outer hydrogen layers, revealing a super-hot, luminous helium core.

Wolf-Rayet stars can form in two ways: when a massive star releases its own hydrogen gas in a powerful solar wind, or when a companion star gravitationally strips it of material. The newly discovered binary system falls into the latter category, and the Wolf-Rayet star has been nicknamed "Nasty 1" after the initials of the last names of the astronomers who discovered it in 1963 - Jason Nassau and Charles Stephenson.

The process of "sucking" material from NaSt1 was inefficient, causing a large amount of gas to escape into a disk-shaped nebula around the binary star system. This 3.2 trillion km wide nebula is thought to be only a few thousand years old and is only about 3,000 light years from Earth.

Astronomers predict that in the future, the cannibal star may undergo a series of explosions or the cannibalized star may become a supernova.

Since more than 70% of giant stars are thought to be members of binary star systems, astronomers are very interested in learning about NaSt1's binary star system./.

According to Daily Mail