NASA’s Kepler spacecraft recently spotted a vampire star system in space and it’s an unusual super-outburst.
Designed to find exoplanets, Kepler sometimes spots other objects that brighten or dim, including the one above. According to Kepler archival data, this super-outburst hails from an unknown dwarf nova.
The star system is a white dwarf star and its brown dwarf “friend,” which is roughly one-tenth as big as the white dwarf. It circles the white dwarf every 83 minutes at a distance of 250,000 miles. Both objects are so close that a “sucking” effect takes place, meaning the white dwarf’s strong gravity takes away material from the brown dwarf. This stripped material develops into a disk as it spirals in the direction of the white dwarf.
Interestingly enough, Kepler witnessed the vampire star system undergoing a super-outburst in space. The spacecraft was able to take data every half hour and capture crucial details of this bizarre event. Kepler’s findings were detailed in the Oct. 21 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“In a sense, we discovered this system accidentally,” said Ryan Ridden-Harper of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), in Baltimore, Maryland. “We weren’t specifically looking for a super-outburst. We were looking for any sort of transient.”
Kepler caught a glimpse of the super-outburst, which involved an increase in brightness that was followed by rapid intensification, according to NASA. Unlike other super-outbursts, there was a slow rise in brightness, which isn’t currently backed up by standard theories of accretion disk physics.
“These dwarf nova systems have been studied for decades, so spotting something new is pretty tricky,” added Ridden-Harper. “We see accretion disks all over – from newly forming stars to supermassive black holes – so it’s important to understand them.”
The team aims to continue studying Kepler data and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) data to search for other strange star systems like this one.
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