Article Posted on : - May 25, 2010

An artist’s impression of the helium eating binary KL Dra. Photo by R. Hynes and G. Roelofs.

LONDON (BNS): A team of astronomers led by Dr Gavin Ramsay of Armagh Observatory have spotted violent eruptions from an interacting pair of stars that orbit around each other every 25 minutes.

The new observations were made using the fully robotic Liverpool Telescope sited in the Canary Islands and the orbiting Swift observatory, according to a news release by the Royal Astronomical Society.

The stars are both helium-rich white dwarfs. Reflecting their location in the direction of the constellation of Draco, they are named KL Dra. They are separated by a distance equivalent to just half of that between the Earth and Moon, close enough for the more massive partner to drag helium off its lighter companion.

"This is another excellent example of the unique power of our robotic telescope that proves particularly effective when it works with space based observatories like Swift. In this case it helped us to discover a completely new type of celestial object," said Prof. Iain Steele, Director of the Liverpool Telescope, as quoted in the release.

The team of astronomers obtained complementary observations of KL Dra using the Swift observatory. This showed that the eruption was seen very strongly in ultraviolet (UV) light. Surprisingly, unlike the hydrogen eating binaries there was no change in the system's brightness in X-rays during the eruption.