The universe is a star museum.
Up close, we have our beloved sun in its middle age.
Farther out, we’ll find white dwarfs nearing the end of their days.
Peer deeper, and you’ll stumble upon hyper-dense neutron stars on the brink of collapsing into black holes.
Technically, the team’s discovery is of a binary star system, or one star orbiting another.
Seems intuitive, but for a long time, that was just a hypothesis.
They’ve even recorded ELM white dwarfs with companions no longer consuming them.
Thanks to El-Badry’s revelatory documentation, the transitional step seems to be proven at last.
“They were more puffed up and bloated than ELMs.
They also were egg-shaped because the gravitational pull of the other star distorts their spherical shape.”
Aptly, he compares the importance of this breakthrough to biological studies of organisms.
“You go out into the jungle and find an organism.
