Space news: Astronomers have found a teardrop-shaped star and it’s as weird as it sounds – Express.co.uk
ASTRONOMERS have discovered an incredibly rare star that is shaped like a teardrop, and the discovery was made possible with the aid of citizen scientists and NASA’s TESS satellite.
The teardrop star was warped into its unusual shape by the gravitational tug of a smaller, neighbouring red dwarf star. The start represents a family of so-called pulsators or stars that oscillate with a discernible pattern on all sides.
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The new star, however, only appears to oscillate on one hemisphere – a phenomenon that has never been seen before.
The discovery was led by astronomers at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw, Poland.
The astronomers presented their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Professor Gerald Handler, who led the study, said: “The exquisite data from the TESS satellite meant that we could observe variations in brightness due to both the gravitational distortion of the star as well as the pulsations.
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Space news: Astronomers have found a teardrop-shaped star in deep space (Image: GABRIEL PEREZ DIAZ)
Space news: The teardrop star was spotted by NASA’s TESS space telescope (Image: MIT)
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Another astronomer involved in the study said he has been hunting down these rare stars for the last four decades.
Co-author Don Kurtz, a professor at the University of Central Lancashire, said: “I’ve been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years. Now we have finally found one.”
Astronomers have theorised the existence of these unusual stars since the 1940s.
And in the last 30 years, astronomers have speculated a star’s oscillation can be shifted by tidal forces.
Professor Kurtz said: “We’ve known theoretically that stars like this should exist since the 1980s.”
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The initial discovery was made by NASA’s TESS, which is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space telescope.
We’ve known theoretically that stars like this should exist since the 1980s
The NASA mission was designed to hunt down alien exoplanets by observing stars for brief dips in brightness.
Periodic dips could be a sign of a planet orbiting a star.
Amateur astronomers and citizens scientist trawled through the data collected by TESS in search of unusual phenomena.
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The astronomers then alerted their colleagues when they came across the pulsator and its red dwarf companion.
Paulina Sowicka, a PhD student who took part in the discovery, said: “As the binary stars orbit each other, we see different parts of the pulsating star.
“Sometimes we see the side that points towards the companion star and sometimes we see the outer face.”
The movements allowed the astronomers to determined they pulsations were found only one side of the star.
The pulsations resulted in tiny fluctuations in brightness that were picked up by NASA’s TESS.
The astronomers are now certain there are many more of these stars out there in the depths of space.
Co-author Professor Saul Rappaport from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said other examples are likely lurking in the TESS data sets.
He said: “Beyond its pulsations, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about this system, so we expect to find many more hidden in the TESS data!”
The study was published under the title of .
