In message , Mr. 4X
writes
Andrew Yee wrote in message
:

snip


Tuesday, 05 October 2004

Mystery Object Neither Star Nor Brown Dwarf

Astronomers using the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes have peered
inside a violent binary star system to find that one of the
interacting stars has lost so much mass to its partner that it has
regressed to a strange, inert body resembling no known star type.

Unable to sustain nuclear fusion at its core and doomed to orbit with
its much more energetic white dwarf partner for millions of years, the
dead star is essentially a new, indeterminate type of stellar object.

"Like the classic line about the aggrieved partner in a romantic
relationship, the smaller donor star gave, and gave, and gave some
more until it had nothing left to give," says Steve B. Howell, an
astronomer with Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) telescope and the
National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, AZ. "Now the donor
star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered
a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and
it is far too low in mass to be a star. There's no true category for
an object in such limbo."

Well...

Drained star?
Leached star?
Exploited star?
Eroded star?


Hollywood? :-)