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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a star ejecting balls of plasma [astronomy.com] twice the size of Mars:

NASA's Hubble Telescope found superhot blobs of gas twice the size of Mars being ejected near a dying star. The plasma balls are moving so quickly that it would only take about half an hour for them to go from Earth to the Moon. Astronomers think this stellar "cannon fire" has been happening once every eight-and-a-half years for the past 400 years.

Astronomers are trying to solve the mystery of where these fireballs came from, but their best explanation is that they came from an unseen companion star. The companion star is in an elliptical orbit. As it entered host star V Hyrdrea's outer atmosphere, it eats up material, which is then turned into a disk around the companion star. The disk becomes a sort of launching pad for the plasma balls.

HIGH-SPEED BULLET EJECTIONS DURING THE AGB-TO-PLANETARY NEBULA TRANSITION: HST OBSERVATIONS OF THE CARBON STAR, V HYDRAE [hubblesite.org] (open, DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/827/2/92) (DX [doi.org])

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