Stars fusing

Two stars may have been caught going into a hypothesized act I like to call STAR FUSION POWER! I'm not sure if thats a good name but lets stick with it.
Basically V1309 was discovered back in 2008 when it started letting out extremely bright solar flares, and so a group of researches decided to see what they could find, luckily a project researching dark matter has had their eye in that area of the sky for a while.

So after trolling through over 2000 images section by section, they came upon the conclusion that V1309 was originally a "contact binary star" which is science slang for two stars that circle each other so close that they are touching, which sounds extremely awesome and it is, problem being that eventually they star transferring mass until eventually (tens of millions of years later) they merge to make one larger star. The amazing thing is that although the merger takes tens millions of years to prepare, the physical merger takes only a few years, the core merger happens in less than a week..

That week was in late august 2008, up to this moment it was doubling in brightness every 19 days, however in late august 2008 its brightness increased by a factor of 300 in only 10 days.

Its final burst happened at the end of that month with the most luminescent burst so far in its life time, this burst happened when the cores of the two stars finally merged, making the new star more than 10,000 times brighter than the original star and more than 30,000 times brighter than our sun.

This new star is spinning outrageously quickly, and is throwing off huge amounts of matter into space making the star almost impossible too see, however when this matter clears we may get our first view of a merged contact binary star.

via
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/71387/title/Two_stars_caught_fusing_into_one

A MATCH MADE IN THE HEAVENS from Science News on Vimeo.