Tübingen and Potsdam astronomers have discovered a rare “stellar marriage”. The research team suspects a kind of merger behind a type of star with unusual properties, the University of Tübingen announced on Monday.
According to the information, the astronomers had been looking for “hot stars” in order to better understand the final phases of stellar development. The team came across stars with unusual properties: while normal star surfaces consist of hydrogen and helium, the stars that were found under the direction of Professor Klaus Werner from the University of Tübingen are covered with carbon and oxygen. These two elements are the ashes of a helium nuclear fusion. This is usually the case when stars are close to their final stages and become white dwarfs.
Helium nuclei continue to fuse inside stars
However, the temperatures and diameters of the observed stars indicate that helium nuclei continue to fuse inside them, which speaks against an end-stage.
Nicole Reindl from the University of Potsdam explained that the team now assumes “that in binary systems with very specific stellar masses, a white dwarf with a carbon-oxygen core can be ruptured by tidal forces”. Its material is then dumped onto the surface of the second star in the binary, giving rise to these exotic stars. However, more precise development models are needed to fully explain the phenomenon found. The results so far have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society published.