“weird star” RS Oph

Tuesday 17 April 2007 - Filed under Astronomy

Name this star: “It’s 5000 light years away, it’s a binary, it’s two old stars, one puffy and bloated, the other tiny and compressed, and one is eating the other while the other blows off a wind, and the tiny one periodically explodes, and forms a peanut-shaped soap bubbly nephroidal shell, which we can observe and model…”

RS Oph, of course, as excellently summed up by our friend the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.


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2007-04-17  »  lolife