A wise man once said that there are more stars in the known universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. Who knows how many stars there are in the whole Universe, not just in the part that we humans call ‘observable’? Therefore, we should never be surprised if new types of stars are discovered.
According to SciTechDaily.com, astronomers from the universities of the German cities Tübingen and Potsdam have discovered a new type of stars after observations made using the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST).
Meet the stars covered in carbon and oxygen
The new type of stars discovered are covered in oxygen and carbon, meaning the ashes of helium burning. This is uncommon for stars, considering that these cosmic objects usually have surfaces that are made of hydrogen and helium. The peculiar stars are also ‘special’ because there’s a good chance that they are still burning helium within their kernels.
Prof. Klaus Werner from Tübingen University and who’s also the lead author of the study paper, explains as SciTechDaily.com quotes:
Normally we expect stars with these surface compositions to have already finished burning helium in their cores, and to be on their way to become white dwarfs. These new stars are a severe challenge to our understanding stellar evolution.
But what could have caused the existence of such unusual stars in the first place? Luckily enough, there is a possible explanation coming from other astronomers from the University of La Plata in Argentina and also the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. Lead author Miller Bertolami stated, as the same source mentioned above quotes:
We believe the stars discovered by our German colleagues might have formed in a very rare kind of stellar merger event between two white dwarf stars.
The new study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
