Daniel CleryAstronomers believe they have solved the 16-year-old mystery of a star surrounded by an enigmatic ring of ultraviolet light.
If they’re right, the “Blue Ring Nebula” offers a glimpse of a fleeting phenomenon: a star still reeling from its birth via the merger of two other stars.“Finding a bona fide merger event will be very helpful in developing our understanding of stellar mergers,” says astronomer Boris Gaensicke of the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the study.
And because many, if not most, stars originate as binaries, mergers could drive the births of countless stars, says astronomer Morgan Fraser at University College Dublin, also not involved with the work. “There’s a lot we don't know about how stellar.