An artist's impression of a vampire system. Image credit: NASA and L. Hustak (STScI)
An artist's impression of a vampire system. Image credit: NASA and L. Hustak (STScI) - Astronomers have found a 'vampire' star in the midst of a feeding frenzy, with the help of an automated program that is sifting through archived data from the decommissioned Kepler Space Telescope. The new program acts like a detective to find clues of very fast, mysterious explosions in the Universe. Lead researcher Ryan Ridden-Harper said the program found a dwarf nova, which comprises a white dwarf - the dense remains of a star, something our Sun will be in billions of years - gorging on a brown dwarf companion. The brown dwarf, which is 10 times less massive, is a failed star resembling a planet. "The rare event we found was a super-outburst from the dwarf nova, which can be thought of as a vampire star system," said Mr Ridden-Harper, who conducted the study as part of his PhD at The Australian National University (ANU). "The incredible data from Kepler reveals a 30-day period during which the dwarf nova rapidly became 1,600 times brighter before dimming quickly and gradually returning to its normal brightness.
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