Long speculated category of stars observed for the first time

[FfFfFfFF 58,120]

Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have observed a new type of binary star that has long been theorized to exist. The discovery finally confirms how a rare type of star in the universe forms and evolves.

The new class of stars, described in this month's issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was discovered by postdoctoral fellow Kareem El-Badry using the Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory in California and data from several astronomical surveys. 

""This is exciting; it's a missing evolutionary link in binary star formation models that we've been looking for", says El-Badry.

When a star dies, there's a 97 percent chance it will become a white dwarf, a small dense object that has contracted and dimmed after burning through all its fuel. [...] But in rare instances, a star can become an extremely low mass (ELM) white dwarf.

Over the years, astronomers have concluded that the only way for an ELM white dwarf to form is with the help of a binary companion. The gravitational pull from a nearby companion star could quickly (at least, in less than 13.8B years) eat away at a star until it became an ELM white dwarf.

Source - https://phys.org/news/2021-12-astronomers-binary-star.html

[Alvaro Moreno Ullrich 1,554]

So our sun is non-binary. Groundbreaking