Astronomers caught a star-on-star smack down
These bubbles and clouds represent the end of two stars and the beginning of a nebula. (ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Olofsson et al. Acknowledgement: Robert Cumming/)The lives of stars, not unlike human lives, often end in the relative blink of an eye. After burning for billions of years, a modestly sized star turns red, puffs up into a giant, and sloughs off its outer layers, all in the span of a millennium or so. These death throes expel clouds of dust and gas—known as planetary nebulae—that scatter stardust throughout the void while delighting astronomy fans with intricate shapes and (artificially administered) psychedelic color schemes.But astrophysicists have long known that the story couldn’t be that straightforward. While stars are simple, round balls of gas, many of these ex-stars have complicated, not-at-all-spherical shapes. In these cases, something, likely a nearby star, must have gotten roped in at the hour of death, spurring a furious...