Dancing stars and black holes in a cosmic cloud of gas: New research of the 'common envelope phase'
Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - 09:35
in Astronomy & Space
Most massive stars are born in binaries (and sometimes triples, quadruples, and so on). As stars age, they grow larger in size by a hundred-fold or even thousand-fold expansion. When stars in binaries expand, parts of them approach the other star in the binary, whose gravity can then pull off the outer portions of the expanding star. The result is mass transfer from one star to the other.