I was trolling through National Geographic's website yesterday when I stumbled across an article about "vampire stars." These stars, also known as blue stragglers, "seem to lag in age next to the other stars with which they formed—appearing hotter, and thus younger and bluer. Astronomers suspect blue stragglers look so youthful because they've stolen hydrogen fuel from other stars, perhaps after colliding into their victims."
The stars found in the Milky Way's galactic bulge may be siphoning off hydrogen in a different manner. "[T]he blue stragglers in the galactic bulge may have formed by ripping hydrogen off their companion stars. This possibly occurred either when one star fed off its partner in a two-star system, or perhaps after gravitational interactions in a triple-star system had caused two of its members to merge into one."
Well, I know a thing or two about vampires (having read more Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer than I care to publicly admit), and I gotta say that ripping off a star's fuel source so you can be a hotter, sexier, star sounds pretty vampiric to me.
(Image courtesy of the Hubble telescope: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020220.html)
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