Astronomers Find Evidence of a Strange Type of Star

(Before It's News)

Illustration of the red supergiant Betelgeuse, as seen from a fictional orbiting world. © Digital Drew.

One has never been spotted for sure in the wild jungle of strange stellar objects out there, but astronomers now think they have finally found a theoretical cosmic curiosity: a Thorne-Zytkow Object, or TZO, hiding in the neighboring Small Magellanic Cloud. With the outward appearance of garden-variety red supergiants, TZOs are actually two stars in one: a binary pair where a super-dense neutron star has been absorbed into its less dense supergiant parter, and from within it operates its exotic elemental forge.

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© Jason Major for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: betelgeuse, Levesque, Small Magellanic Cloud, Star, stellar evolution, supergiant, Thorne-Zytkow, TZO

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