“Celestial Vampires” — Blue Stragglers
The universe is vast, full of crazy things and has a tendency to create wacky, strange and downright eccentric things that we couldn’t imagine in our most outlandish dreams. Even though we know that our universe is crazy, none had ever thought of a star feeding on another star. We just weren’t ready.
However these “Vampire Stars” do exist in the universe and I’m not making it up. Numerous massive stars co-exist in a binary system and this stellar duo includes one massive star and a companion. These massive stars have a turbulent relationship with their companions; with one of the star either feeding of off the other or violently merging together to form one single more massive star than the pervious, rejuvenating their exhausted hydrogen supply; preventing them from turning into gas giants.
These massive stars were termed by the astronomers in Chile who used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to observe them as massive O-type stars. These massive O-type stars are very hot and incredibly bright. These stars have a surface temperatures of more than 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (30,000 degrees Celsius), live short and violent lives, but they play a key role in the evolution of galaxies.
These celestial versions of vampires are termed as the blue stragglers. These cannibal stars seem to age slowly compared to their companions with whom they were formed this is due to the fact that they feed off of their companions; when they age and get cooler, making them look bluer and younger. Thus the name straggler comes because they straggle behind in their life cycle when compared to their companions. Astronomers suspect blue stragglers look so youthful because they’ve stolen hydrogen fuel from other stars, perhaps after colliding into their victims.
Blue Stragglers are found routinely in star clusters where they have the chance to feed off one another. However, scientists have now found blue stragglers in the Galactic Bulge of the Milky Way, a condensed region of stars and gases at the center. These 180,000 stars close to the bulge were viewed through the Hubble Space Telescope. The team discovered 42 unusually blue stars that appeared much younger than the other stars. The researchers had estimated that only 18–37 of these stars are the real blue stragglers, the rest might be the newly formed stars. They also believe these stragglers to be different than the ones found elsewhere. Researchers believe that they suck the hydrogen fuel from there companions rather than colliding with them. Thus making the stragglers younger, bluer and trimming with newly infused hydrogen fuel; while making their companions cold white dwarfs.
For more information, visit:
https://phys.org/news/2011-12-vampire-star-reveals-secrets.html
https://www.space.com/16767-massive-stars-companions-merge-vampire-stars.html
https://www.space.com/31317-vampire-star-secrets-revealed-hubble-telescope.html
By — Arshiya Sharma
