WASHINGTON — Astronomers have spotted a strange white dwarf star that devours its captive companion and blazes intense light in a rare event called a "super-outburst."<br /><br />NASA published the study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.<br /><br />NASA says that the retired Kepler telescope, which revolved around the sun to search for exoplanets, had captured the archival footage that made this discovery possible."<br /><br />According to NASA's news release, the brown dwarf circles around the stellar vampire every 83 minutes at a distance of 400,000 km.<br /><br />The white dwarf is about the size of the Earth, but its mass is equivalent to the Sun.<br /><br />The little star's huge mass creates a powerful gravitational pull that sucks in matter from the brown dwarf which forms an accretion disk.<br /><br />According to NASA, current theory speculates that when the accretion disk reaches a critical mass, its outer edge experiences gravitation resonance with the orbiting star.<br /><br />The resonance heats up the accretion disk, raising the temperature from a normal high of 5,300 degrees Celcius to a peak of 11,700 degrees.<br /><br />The study says that the enormous heat build up results in the blaze known as the super-outburst in a repetitive process."<br /><br />NASA further states that current theory does not explain why there is a long delay between each outburst.
