Giant ‘cannonballs’ shooting from star.

Giant ‘cannonballs’ shooting from star. 

NASA said – somewhere near the star V Hydrae, a bloated dying giant star, some 1,200 light-years from Earth – something is emitting giant superhot blobs of gas, hurtling them through space so fast that they’d travel the distance from Earth to our moon in only 30 minutes. The Hubble Space Telescope detected the gas balls, each of which are twice as massive as the planet Mars. NASA said this high-speed “cannon fire” has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years, according to the estimates of the team that discovered it.

V Hydrae, a red giant star near the end of its life, has probably shed at least half of its mass into space already, after exhausting the nuclear fuel that makes it shine. Astronomers are very familiar with V Hydrae’s type of star, but they’ve never seen anything like this before, and they know the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star itself. NASA said:

The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star. According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant’s puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years. As the companion enters the bloated star’s outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.

The team has published its results in the peer-reviewed journal called The Astrophysical Journal 

Image via NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI).