Amateur astronomers discover unusual tear-drop shaped, half-pulsating star

11 Mar 2020

Amateur astronomers discover unusual tear-drop shaped, half-pulsating star

Amateur astronomers discover unusual tear-drop shaped, half-pulsating starRecently, NASA's planet-hunting space satellite TESS spotted an entirely unknown type of star - the first of its kind.

It was the amateur astronomers at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, who pointed out that this star of interest, located about 1,500 light-years from Earth, was a very peculiar star!
 	For one, stars like this are usually rich with metals - but this particular star is metal-poor, making it a rare type of hot star.
 	Secondly, they saw the star pulsating on just one side.
 	Stars are known to pulsate, and even our Sun exhibits this kind of activity due to hot gas churning beneath the surface, causing oscillations.
 	Generally, all pulsating stars are similar in that the pulsating can be seen on all sides of the star.
 	But this new star only appears to be pulsating in one hemisphere of its surface.

Why the one-sided pulse?

The researchers were able to determine why this star is behaving in such a unique fashion.
 	It's one of two stars in a binary star system, partnered with a red dwarf star.
 	Red dwarf stars are small, cool stars that are among the most common in our galaxy.
 	In this case, the two stars orbit each other so closely that they zip around each other in less than two Earth days.
 	Given their proximity, the red dwarf star's gravitational pull actually distorts the pulsations of the larger star.
 	This causes the larger star to be distorted into more of a teardrop shape, rather than the usual sphere.

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Recently, NASA’s planet-hunting space satellite TESS spotted an entirely unknown type of star – the first of its kind. It was the amateur astronomers at […]

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