When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration shows colorful stellar material swirling around a vampire white dwarf star. | Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MITUsing NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) spacecraft, astronomers have obtained their first view of the inner region around a dead white dwarf star that is vampirically feeding on a stellar companion.The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was able to perform a detailed study of the previously inaccessible highly energetic region immediately surrounding a white dwarf in the system EX Hydrae, located around 200 light-years from Earth.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe system is part of a class called an “intermediate polar,” known for emitting a complex pattern of radiation, including X-rays. EX Hydrae comprises a white dwarf, the end stage of life for stars of similar masses to the sun, and its victim star, which completes an orbit of the dead star every 98 minutes. That makes EX Hydrae one of the closest intermediate polar binaries ever discovered.Not only did the researchers discover a high degree of polarization among the X-rays, which describes agreement in the direction the waves that comprise electromagnetic radiation are angled in, but they were also able to trace this energetic radiation to a 2,000-mile-tall (3,200 kilometers) column of blisteringly hot stellar material being pulled from the companion star, dropping onto the white dwarf.That’s around half the radius of the white dwarf itself and much larger than scientists had previously estimated for such a structure. The team also detected X-rays reflecting off the surface of the white dwarf before being scattered, something that has been predicted but was never previously confirmed.Intermediate polars earned their name due to variations in the strength of white dwarfs’ magnetic fields. When the magnetic field is particularly strong, these dead stars pull material from their companion stars, which then flows toward the white dwarfs’ poles. However, when the magnetic fields of white dwarfs are weak, stripped material forms swirling structures called accretion disks around white dwarfs. From there, this stolen stellar matter is then gradually fed to the surfaces of the stellar remnants.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe situation is mor …
