Shadi Abdel-Hafiz

A joint international team led by scientists from the British University of Warwick has discovered a star that swallowed another star around which it was about 1.3 million years ago, both of whom were from a very special class of star called "white dwarfs."

Hot dwarves
White Dwarf is the final stage reached by medium-mass stars such as the sun, where those stars swell at the end of their lives and their surface temperature decreases, and if the sun is now the size of a pea, then after several billion years it will be the size of football.

After that, these giant red stars begin to shake their outer envelopes in the form of strong stellar winds, and within many millions of years, only their nuclei become what becomes this very dense white dwarf.

According to the new study - which was published in the journal Nature Astronomer this March 2 - this star, called "WDJ0551 + 4135", is about 150 light years away from us, and the ESA Jaya telescope has discovered its presence in a group of dwarves. White with a large mass than usual.

After drawing the attention of scientists with its mass, the researchers decided from the Herschel space telescope of the same agency to analyze the light from it more accurately, indicating an unusual amount of carbon relative to the surface of a white dwarf of this size.

Scientists from Warwick University imagined how two of the stars of the new

Unusual theory
According to the new study, the diameter of the star "WDJ0551 + 4135" is approximately two thirds of the diameter of the planet Earth with two thirds of the sun's mass, and although this appears very small, it is not usual for white dwarfs to reach this size or contain that structure.

At that point, the researchers came up with a theory that the newly discovered star did not follow the rules of origin and evolution of stars governed by predetermined physics and thus meant that it resulted from the fusion of two stars of the binary system in the distant past.

Binary stars are common in the universe, but we do not see them with our own eyes because they are far from us or the two stars may be so close to each other that we cannot separate them with our eyes.

According to the study, sometimes it happens that one of the two stars of the binary system swells and shrinks the other, and when they come close to each other because of the force of gravity, they swallow each other inside, and this happens over several million years.

Study researchers hope that this new discovery will help develop our understanding of the natures of white dwarfs, and consequently the origin and evolution of stars in general, especially the future of our warm sun.