Astronomers have discovered huge atmospheric tidal waves millions of miles high crashing down on a distant star.
The star, MACHO 80.7443.1718, is about 16,000 light-years from Earth, found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy that floats around the Milky Way.
It is the most extreme ‘heartbeat star’ on record. Heartbeat stars are objects in close pairs that periodically pulse in brightness, like the rhythm of a beating heart on an EKG machine.
The gravity of the two stars pull on each other, creating tides which stretch and distort the shapes of the stars, causing them to brighten and dim periodically.
In the case of MACHO 80.7443.1718, its pulses are about 200 times brighter than other heartbeat stars – earning it the nickname a ‘heartbreak’ star.
A new study suggests the brightness fluctuations from this system are extreme because of huge waves that roll across the bigger star.
The waves are created when the smaller star in the system makes close passes, pulling on the larger star’s surface, creating a bulge. As the smaller star moves away, the bulge stretches and breaks, creating a wave.
According to the study, these tidal waves gain such towering heights and high speeds that when they break and crash down onto the giant star’s surface like ocean waves, they release enormous amounts of energy.
‘Each crash of the star’s towering tidal waves releases enough energy to disintegrate our entire planet several hundred times over,’ said Dr Morgan MacLeod, lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy.
The waves travel across the surface of the larger star at speeds of up to 100,000 miles per hour. They can reach heights of up to 2.7 million miles, or about a fifth of the larger star’s radius.
The waves are so powerful that they can even change the shape of the larger star, as its surface is constantly being stretched and distorted by the waves. This can cause the star to lose mass and eventually explode as a supernova.
Researchers believe this phenomenon is common. Of the nearly 1,000 heartbeat stars discovered so far, about 20 display large brightness fluctuations approaching those of the system simulated by Dr MacLeod.
‘This heartbreak star could just be the first of a growing class of astronomical objects,’ he said. ‘We’re already planning a search for more heartbreak stars, looking for the glowing atmospheres flung off by their breaking waves.’
The astronomer added that we are lucky to have caught the star in this phase as a ‘brief and transformative moment’ in the star’s long life.
By watching the colossal surf roll across a stellar surface, astronomers hope to understand how close interactions shape the evolution of stellar pairs.
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