Indeed, the white dwarf swings close to the red giant during its 44-year orbit, funneling material onto its surface, occasionally exploding like "a gigantic hydrogen bomb," the Hubble team said in ...

Once a star becomes a red giant, it has a lot of cooking to do. Under the immense pressure in its core, heat fuses helium into carbon. After thousands of years, it then fuses carbon and helium to ...

They occur when a white dwarf and main sequence star, often a red giant, are in tight orbits around each other, and the ...

According to Space.com, around 85% of stars exist in binary star systems. R Aquarii consists of a massive, cool red giant star and a dense, compact, hot white dwarf star. The two stars have a ...