Newly born stars with never-before-seen properties in Milky Way baffle astronomers

Astronomers from the University of Tübingen in Germany have come across two stars in the Milky Way galaxy with never before seen properties. Discovered using the Arizona-based Large Binocular Telescope in the US, the stars have been found to be covered in carbon and oxygen instead of the usual hydrogen and helium on their surfaces.

With such baffling features, the scientists believe that the newly found entities have resulted from a rare stellar merger between two white dwarf stars. 

'New stars are a severe challenge': Lead researcher

Named PG1654+322 and PG1528+025, the stars are located around 10,000 and 25,000 light-years away from Earth and have presented themselves as a mind-bending concept. As mentioned above, these stars have a high abundance of carbon and oxygen, which are actually by-products of helium nuclear fusion, the experts note in their study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Another reason why these stars are baffling astronomers is that such amount of the said elements (20% of the surface composition) is normally seen in stars that have already undergone nuclear fusion reactions at their core and are at the end stages of their lives. 

Professor Klaus Werner of the University of Tübingen and lead researcher said, as per Daily Mail, "We normally expect stars with the chemical surface composition of the stars discovered to have completed the helium fusion in their centres and to be in the final stages of becoming white dwarfs." He added that these stars are 'a severe challenge' to their understanding of stellar evolution. 

Owing to their properties, the experts believe that these two entities have emerged from the merger of two white dwarf stars, which are hot and dense remains of a dead star. Miller Bertolami, another author of the study said that the mergers of white dwarfs do not usually result in the formation of carbon and oxygen-rich stars, however, he added that they can form when a white dwarf might be disrupted and end up on top of a helium-rich one in binary systems with specific masses. Now that the discovery has been made, the experts believe that their new study can improve the understanding of the late evolution of binary systems.

(Image: Chandra X-ray observatory)