A pair of young stars within the Tarantula Nebula galaxy is moving so close towards one another that they seem to be smooching. Scientists say that after the pair's final kiss, this very strange cosmic affair can only lead to two endings: they could either merge and become one giant star, or burn up on their own and go supernova.
These two young and very hot stars are part of a star system called VFTS 352 which is 160,000 light-years away from Earth. Orbiting each other all day, the two stars are separated by a distance of 12 million kilometers or 7.4 million miles. However, they don't seem to be so far from one another as each star's super-heated plasma is beginning to fuse one lobe to the other.
The VFTS 352 is also part of a tiny class of stars known as overcontact binaries, scientists say. Its mass is 57 times bigger than our solar system's Sun, and its components are about 40,000 degrees Celsius or 72,302 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers from the European Southern Observatory said that unlike vampire stars or a binary star system where the smaller star literally sucks matter from the surface of its larger counterpart, both stars in the VFTS 352 are identical in size. This leads scientists to conclude that the two stars are sharing 30 percent of each other's components rather than forcing them out.
Scientists think that the VFTS 352 faces two possible endings. If the two stars merge together, the star system would implode and create one highly-magnetic, rapidly-rotating, gigantic star.
"If it keeps spinning rapidly, it might end its life in one of the most energetic explosions in the universe, known as a long-duration gamma-ray burst," explained Hugues Sana from the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Selma de Mink from the University of Amsterdam, lead astrophysicist of the study, also said that from another vantage point, both stars may possibly remain compact and avoid merging with each other. If this happens, the two stars will separately become supernovas and produce black holes. This would also result in the formation of powerful gravitational waves.
Meanwhile, no matter how the VFTS 352 meets its end, the star system has provided fascinating new information into how massive overcontact star systems undergo evolutionary processes.
All these scientific findings are published in a study called "Discovery of the massive overcontact binary VFTS 352: Evidence for enhanced internal mixing" on the The Astrophysical Journal.
Watch an artist's rendition of the movement of the two stars here:
