Artist’s conception of a white dwarf and a companion star. The white dwarf, the bright white object within the disk, sucks matter from its more sedate companion star. The star eventually emits a huge flash of light. (Image: NASA)
Astrophysicist works with amateur astronomers to confirm theory about light bursts from binary star 370 light-years from Earth. A University of Alberta physicist brought together backyard astronomers and professionals to confirm the mysterious behaviour of two stars more than 300 light-years from Earth. U of A space physics researcher Gregory Sivakoff was part of an international team that re-examined an established theory about periodic bursts of light coming from a distant binary star. The two stars are called a binary star because they rotate around each other. The accepted theory on why this binary star, named SS Cygni, emits periodic bursts of light involves an interaction between the pair. Sivakoff explains that one of the stars, a normal star that is a lower-mass cousin to our sun, loses bits of its outer envelope to its neighbour, a white dwarf—which is as massive as our sun, but squeezed down to the size of Earth. "Gravity continuously draws material from the normal star's envelope, but it is only when the material rushes toward the white dwarf that we get an outburst of light," said Sivakoff.
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