Cosmological Cannibalism

About a hundred light years away, a pair of stars have come together to give rise to the hope of future offspring planets. But this isn't a story of world-making stellar romance, the tale of BP Piscium and it's (ex-)companion is one of cosmological cannibalism.

BP Piscium was a middle aged star, and like most middle aged things it had let itself go and started to swell in size. All fine and dandy for the newly expanded red giant star - less fine for the companion that after millions of years of being happily married to an orbit around BP suddenly found itself inside the atmosphere of a hugely swollen ball of nuclear-created plasma. Not a great place to be. Scientists (who for this case might as well be called 'investigating officers') believe that the star has been consumed, partly eaten and the rest spread around the new giant in a potentially planet-forming disc of ex-star wreckage big enough to make fifty Earths. Whether any will actually form a star depends on a number of factors, not least how much the greedy Piscium eats.

How the middle-aged murderer will react to a new planet is unclear - planets are usually formed around young stars from the leftovers of the stellar dust that created them. This greener "stellar recycling" scheme is not often seen, with only one other possible case (the snappily titled TYCHO 4144 329 2) having been observed. Should planets form they won't give rise to anything like our own life-supporting sphere, however - their proximity to a giant star makes any life like ours impossible, and anything that does start to crawl around up there will need various things we don't have. The ability to survive lethal radiation, for one.

The observing officers of UCLA are planning to pursue investigations of this matter, analyzing security footage from the Hubble telescope and applying for a warrant to use the Chandra X-Ray observatory to examine the scene of the crime. No word on whether they're planning to question nearby quasars yet. If you were in the high galactic latitude region around the last few millenia, UCLA scientists would like to speak with you.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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