The venerable Hubble Space Telescope has seen some things, man. An eye-opening new Hubble image shows the binary star system R Aquarii having a cosmic freakout. The view shows a wild, colorful nebula with filaments of gas reaching out in a spiral pattern. “The twisted stellar outflows make the region look like a lawn sprinkler gone berserk,” the Hubble team said in a statement on Oct. 16.
R Aquarii is located around 700 light-years away in the Aquarius constellation. The two stars are a celestial odd couple. One is a red giant—a big, luminous star in the process of dying—that’s over 400 times larger than the sun. The Hubble team describes it as a pulsating “bloated monster star” that peaks at nearly 5,000 times our sun’s brightness. The other is a white dwarf, the small and dense core of a dead star. Together, they’re known as symbiotic stars.
The red giant and white dwarf have an explosive relationship. “When the white dwarf star swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas,” the Hubble team said. “This material accumulates on the dwarf star’s surface until it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion, making that surface explode like a gigantic hydrogen bomb.” This is what creates the wild loops of glowing material seen in the image.
Hubble is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. It launched in 1990 and has weathered all sorts of technical challenges over the years. It’s elderly in space telescope terms, but continues to send back important data and images from its observations of the universe. Earlier this year, NASA shifted the telescope into a new operational mode to work around a recurring glitch with one of its gyroscopes. The space agency hopes the adjustment will keep Hubble working into the 2030s.
Hubble has been monitoring R Aquarii for decades. ESA released a timelapse video showing the evolution of the star system from 2014 to 2023. Look for shifts in brightness and for how the nebula changes over time.
Researchers used some colorful terms for R Aquarii, calling it “one of the most rambunctious stars in our galaxy” and “a stellar volcano.” R Aquarii looks like a piece of art, like staring into the swirls inside a glass marble. In reality, the nebula is huge. “The scale of the event is extraordinary even in astronomical terms,” the Hubble team said. “Space-blasted material can be traced out to at least 248 billion miles from the stars, or 24 times our solar system’s diameter.”
We don’t live in a binary star system, but R Aquarii represents a glimpse at our sun’s distant future. Our star will eventually become a red giant and then collapse into a white dwarf billions of years from now.
The extraordinary R Aquarii image is a testament to Hubble’s ability to see details over great distances and illuminate changes over time. The symbiotic stars of R Aquarii show just how dynamic the universe can be.
