For four years, NASA monitored a huge patch of the sky, specifically looking for brightness changes caused by exoplanets passing in front of their host stars. Theyended up finding what they were looking for, bit it exceeded their own expectations “ a passel of pumpkin stars that spin so incredibly fast, they’ve been flattened into shapes that look like actual pumpkins. The rare, pumpkin-like stars produce intense X-ray emissions at more than 100 times the peak levels astronomers have seen from the sun.
As for the pumpkin shape, it could be the result of close binary systems where two sun-like stars orbit faster as they grow closer, eventually merge together, and form the pumpkin star, according to NASA.The transition might take 100 million years, which obviously sounds like a crazy amount of time. But 100 million years is a relatively brief phase in a star’s life.
The Swift study also found 93 X-ray objects ” half being active galaxies and the rest being various types of X-ray emitting stars.Check out NASA’s video for more on the cosmicevent.
