Astronomers at the Very Large Telescope have announced they've discovered a very strange pair of stars engaging in some unique behavior. They've documented their findings in a paper published in the journal Nature.

The stars in question, a binary star system called AR Scorpii, have been under investigation for a while. Back in 2015, astronomers noticed the star system pulses brighter every two minutes. Pulsating stars aren't new, but two minutes is extremely fast, and scientists were at a loss to explain what was going on.

But now, thanks to observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers understand what's happening. The stars in AR Scorpii are small. One is a red dwarf about a third of the mass of our sun, and the other is a white dwarf about the same size as the Earth, but it contains 200,000 times the mass. The dense white dwarf is spinning incredibly fast, and it's throwing out a bunch of high-energy electrons, which leave the star at nearly the speed of light. These electrons generate radiation in two beams on opposite sides of the star, like a stellar lighthouse.

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Every 1.97 minutes, these beams of electrons whips the red dwarf star, the other half of the star system. These beams impact the star with so much energy that the star gets noticeably brighter, resulting in the pulsating effect we see here on Earth. While astronomers have observed this kind of effect before from neutron stars, or pulsars, AR Scorpii is the first observed instance of this effect from a white dwarf.

Astronomers now know what is happening in the AR Scorpii system, but they are still unsure exactly how. Specifically, it's a bit of a mystery where the high-energy electrons that shoot out from the white dwarf are coming from. They could be produced by the white dwarf itself, or they could be from the less energetic red dwarf, or from something else entirely. Further observations could unlock the remaining mysteries of this abusive stellar relationship.

Source: ESO

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