Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
About 700 light-years away is a pair of stars which have put on quite a show.
Dramatic and colourful close-ups from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show a binary system of rambunctious stars. See the high-resolution image here.
The system is called R Aquarii. The primary star is an aging red giant more than 400 times heavier than our Sun. Its companion is a burned-out white dwarf.
The red giant pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is nearly 5,000 times brighter than our Sun.
Meanwhile, the white dwarf dances around the red giant. It orbits the giant star every 44 years.
When the white dwarf gets closest to the red giant, its gravity pulls hydrogen gas off the red giant. The material accumulates around the dwarf star and undergoes nuclear fusion. The result is an explosion akin to an enormous nuclear bomb.
Filaments shoot from the dwarf star’s core like a geyser, forming loops and trails of plasma traveling at more than 1.6 million km per hour.
The force of the explosion on the star’s surface twists the plasma streamers which is channelled by a strong magnetic field and bends back on itself. The result is a remarkable spiral pattern which extends 400 billion km into space – 24 times the diameter of our solar system.
NASA’s media release aptly describes the spectacle as resembling a “lawn sprinkler gone berserk”.
