Cannabalistic Stars – Explaining Luminous Red Novae

V838 Monocerotis
This outburst from the red giant star V838 Monocerotis – captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 – is an example of a ‘luminous red nova’. New research shows that such phenomena may be the result of common envelope events (CEEs) in which material tranfers unstably from one star to another. Photo credit: NASA/ESA and H.E. Bond (Space Telescope Science Institute), public domain.

If a star began to eat another star, what would it look like? Natasha Ivanova can tell you better than almost anyone; as the Canada Research Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Alberta, pondering questions like this is her full-time job. Last week, Ivanova and her colleagues published a paper in Science which showed that a certain type of stellar cannibalism previously thought to be invisible can be observed from Earth after all. The finding may explain the existence of the recently-discovered phenomena known as luminous red novae.

Continue reading