The star, who behaves like a vampire!

Astronomers photographed a system of two stars, one of which, like a vampire, has collected a large amount of matter from its companion. Telescopes used to observe the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which together formed a working virtual telescope that gives a sharper image than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers using ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile, made ​​the observation of an unusual binary system SS Leporis visible in the constellation Zajac. This system consists of two stars orbiting with a period of 260 days. The stars are distant from each other by a distance smaller than the Earth from the Sun. In order to obtain the binary image made ​​observations with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). The light from several telescopes observing the same object has given rise to a virtual telescope with a diameter corresponding to the facility for up to 130 meters. The resulting image is 50 times sharper than pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) - HST resolution is about 50 milliseconds of arc, and the resolution of the virtual telescope VLTI achieves a millisecond arc. It's as if seen from the Earth's surface located astronaut on the moon. In a binary system SS Leporis one of the stars has a very large size, spans an area almost equal to the orbit of Mercury. But this is less than thought so far - astronomers have speculated that the star is even greater. The smaller the diameter of the star causes a problem in explaining the flow of matter between the components of the system. Perhaps instead of flow of matter is ejected from the red giant by the stellar wind and captured by the hotter companion. - It's what we discovered is that the most likely way of mass transfer occurred in a completely different way than previous models suggested in this process. + Bite + star-vampire is a very delicate, but extremely effective - said Henri Boffin from ESO, which is composed of the research team.

Vampires are everywhere...