The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an intricate portrait of two nearby stars that have been in close contact for centuries, revealing once again the complex yet volatile relationship of a stellar duo.
The striking, hour-glass-shaped nebula seen in the new image was forged from the centuries-long interaction between its two distinct occupants: a compact, largely unchanging white dwarf and its companion star, an aging red giant that has swelled to more than 400 times our sun's size and dims and brightens over a fairly long period of 387 Earth days.
The star system, known as R Aquarii, resides about 710 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. It belongs to the symbiotic class of variable stars, a classification borrowed from the biological term "symbiosis," which refers to two organisms of different species coexisting close to one another.
Source: www.space.com
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