This Dead Star Is Feeding on Its Neighbor

Somewhere, a dead star is feeding on its neighbor, erupting again and again.

It is a white dwarf, an Earth-sized stellar corpse, locked in orbit with a living star it is slowly pulling apart.

A white dwarf has gravity a hundred thousand times stronger than Earth's. Orbiting close to another star, it rips hydrogen off its companion onto its own surface. The stolen gas piles up, compressed and heated, until the bottom layer hits a flash point. Then it ignites all at once in a thermonuclear blast that lights up the sky. We call it a nova. The white dwarf survives, starts stealing again, and the cycle repeats. Some systems erupt every few decades like clockwork. One, called T Coronae Borealis, flares about every eighty years, bright enough to appear to the naked eye.

A nova is not the death of a star. It is a dead star reaching across space, stealing fuel from the living, and burning it in stolen fire.

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