Every 1.97 minutes, 380 light years from Earth, a star in the constellation Scorpius brightens then fades. Using the ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, along with other handful telescopes, they were able to figure out the extraordinary story behind this flickering star. And the result is something violent and twisted.
The results were published this week in Nature.
The star called AR Scorpii is not actually a single star but two stars -- a star system.
In this star system, there's a cool red dwarf, about a third mass of our sun, and there is a compact, rapidly spinning white dwarf, with the mass of 200,000 Earths compressed into something the size of one.
The flickering turns out to be a violent process between these two stars. As the dense white dwarf spins through space, it accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light. These energetic particles release a "lighthouse-like beam" of radiation that whips the red dwarf every couple of minutes, causing the system to pulse with light, as observed by ESO.
Though some theories predict that white dwarfs can also pulse, many aspects of this sadistic behavior of this particular system are still a mystery.
Source: Business Insider
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