In an intriguing discovery, NASA's Hubble telescope has discovered giant cannonballs of gas, shooting near a dying star. The massive blobs of gas are being ejected at a very high speed and astronomers estimate that the phenomenon has continued once every 8.5 years, for the past 400 years.
Hubble's discovery of fireballs has caught the attention of scientists and they are highly puzzled by this strange phenomenon, reports Phys.org. They think that the blobs could not be shot by the host star, that is, V Hydrae. This is because it is a red giant- a dying star, a kind of star that is in the last stages of its life and is exhausting its nuclear fuel and therefore, emits light.
Some scientists believe that an unseen companion star is behind these plasma balls. They theorize that the companion star must be in an elliptical orbit, which would have carried it close to the bloated atmosphere of the red giant every 8.5 years.
When it entered the atmosphere, it absorbed material, which settled into a circle around the companion star. This very circle then served as the launching pad for the gas blobs that are traveling at a speed of about half-million miles per hour.
This cannonball fire from V Hydrae is really a curious matter but scientists often observe it around dying stars, claims The Space Reporter. According to Prof. Raghvendra Sahai of NASA, they knew this object had a high-speed outflow from previous data, but it is for the first time that they were seeing this process in action.
He also suggests that the gaseous blobs produced in the later stages of the life of a star help to create the structures seen in planetary nebulae. In the past two decades, Hubble has revealed a great deal of complexity in the structure of the planetary nebulae.
The high resolution of the telescope has captured knots of material in the gas clouds surrounding the stars and astronomers believe that these knots are actually jets ejected by disks of material around the dying stars.
