Putting together this first segment of the news, I was struck by a quote from Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It goes like this: 

You are not alone // Believe me // No one is alone.

While Sondheim is no longer with us, his words are, and they remind us that even in the vastness of the universe, nothing is ever truly alone. Unfortunately, these relationships aren’t the grace one might wish for. Those two supermassive black holes? They’ll merge and blast their surrounding galaxy. Stars in binary systems? They often cannibalize each other. And even a lonely star and its planets can run into problems.

New Chandra X-Ray observations of the white dwarf KPD 0005+5106 reveal that it is flashing in X-ray light every 4.7 hours. This is consistent with this dead star having a companion that is orbiting at about twice the distance of the Moon and getting material torn off with every orbit. While it’s possible the companion is a faint star or brown dwarf, the data is more consistent with the victim in this violent system being a Jupiter-like planet.

This paints an amazing story of the dead core of a star – something the size of the Moon and the mass of a star – shining at 360,000˚F as it blasts a Jupiter-sized object two Moon-Earth distances away and tearing material off that physically larger and gravitationally smaller planet.

This work appears in The Astrophysical Journal, is led by You-Hua Chu, and is going to inspire at least one space artist to spend her weekend imagining the dangerous liaison between a world and its star.

More Information

CXO press release

“Hard X-ray Emission Associated with White Dwarfs. IV. Signs of Accretion from Sub-stellar Companions,” You-Hua Chu et al., to be published in The Astrophysical Journal (preprint on arxiv.org)