The Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with an amazing view of a huge star that’s periodically exploding and ejecting loops and curls of plasma into space.
This explosive star is a binary star system called R Aquarii located about 700 lightyears from Earth.
Of the two in the system, the primary star is a red giant – a bloated, aging star – while its companion is a compacted stellar husk known as a white dwarf.
More amazing Hubble observations
The red giant is over 400 times larger than our Sun and pulsates, changes temperature and varies in brightness by a factor of over 750 times across a 390-day period.
It’s a class of stars known as a Mira variable star and, at its peak brightness, is 5,000 times brighter than our Sun.
The binary star dance of destruction
Binary star systems like this involve two stars orbiting each other in a gravitational waltz.
When the white dwarf star in this system – which has an orbital period of 44 years – comes close to the red giant, its gravitational pull siphons hydrogen gas from the larger star.
Stellar material accumulates on the white dwarf’s surface and eventually causes spontaneous nuclear fusion, causing it to explode like a hydrogen bomb.
Then the fuelling begins anew.
The effects of this can be seen in these new Hubble Space Telescope images and video of R Aquarii: filaments of material shoot out into space forming loops and curls.
This plasma is ejected, twisted by the sheer force of the explosion then channelled by the stars’ magnetic fields.
The plasma is travelling at over 1 million miles per hour, which astronomers say would take it from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes.
What’s more, this violent act is distributing into the space the vital ingredients need for new stars to form.
In this way, such a catastrophic, destructive act will ultimately enable star formation to occur elsewhere in the Universe.