From the deepest blue oceans to the rusty deserts, from the lush green forests to the endless sky, our planet is a spectacular marvel. Yet, Earth is just a small part of an even larger, awe-inspiring universe.

Beyond our blue-green marble, countless stars and worlds shine brightly in the deep and mysterious space. Though these stars may seem cute twinkling phenomena, many of these hold mysteries and peculiarities that humans still cannot fully understand. These stars defy categorisation and are true celestial oddities that challenge our understanding and spark our imaginations.

While most stars follow a well-defined life cycle, burning hydrogen in their core and eventually exploding as supernovas, others exhibit bizarre behaviours that leave scientists scratching their heads. Today, we’ll leave Earth behind and explore these fascinating cosmic curiosities!

A star caught in a cosmic Tug-of-War

Meet SAO 206462 — a star that looks like a miniature spiral galaxy! This young star is located a mere 460 light-years away from Earth. Unlike normal galaxies, which have grand, spiral arms, this star is distorted. Scientists believe that the star’s odd appearance is due to the strong gravitational pull applied by two of its newly forming planets that distorts the shape of the star itself.

The planets are thought to be inside a huge ring of gas and dust around the star. The strong gravity of these large planets is stretching the ring into strange, spiral shapes, giving a unique view in space.

Lucy — a diamond in the universe

BPM 37093 nicknamed ‘Lucy’ after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” So what is the connection?

Originally, the song was inspired by a portrait drawn by Beatles’ John Lennon’s son, young Julian, about a girl floating among the stars that glittered like diamonds. Well, the song itself doesn’t have any connection, but to scientists and researchers, it gave them meaning and they made a connection when they discovered BPM 37093, a white dwarf star with a core of crystallised carbon (diamond also consists of carbon arranged in a crystalline lattice, with a different configuration). It’s a giant diamond estimated to be 10 billion trillion trillion carats in size! And so they named it Lucy.

This celestial jewel in its previous life exhausted its core hydrogen fuel and collapsed into a super-dense white dwarf. The intense pressure within the star caused its carbon core to undergo a mind-boggling transformation, solidifying into the largest diamond the universe has ever known.

Lucy’s physical composition is primarily carbon and oxygen, with a thin layer of hydrogen and helium — typical of a white dwarf, which is what remains of a star after it exhausts its nuclear fuel and dies.

Lucy measures only 2,500 miles across (less than one-third the size of Earth), yet weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, making it the largest dwarf yet identified. Millions of years ago Lucy was as bright as any star, but now generates only 0.06 percent of the light of our sun.

Vega: not perfectly round

Vega is the fifth brightest star in the sky; it was used as a standard reference for the zero point on the magnitude scale in the past. Vega spins incredibly fast, completing a full rotation on its axis every 12.5 hours. This rapid spin has a remarkable effect — it throws material outward at the equator, causing the star to bulge in the middle, into an oblate shape, although, it appears mostly round to us. However, the cooler, darker halo around its equator is a tell-tale sign of its true, oblate shape.

A stellar time bomb

WR104 is considered a time bomb on the brink of explosion, which means it’s nearing its end; it is 7,800 light-years away in our Milky Way galaxy. The star’s core is said to have exhausted its helium fuel and is now frantically burning heavier elements like oxygen, which when it runs out, causes the star to undergo a catastrophic supernova explosion, potentially ripping itself apart and releasing a tremendous amount of energy.

This star is spinning really fast and is paired with another star, which makes things even more dangerous. Scientists think that when this star finally explodes, it might shoot out a powerful beam of energy called a gamma-ray burst. This beam could be very harmful if it hits Earth. Luckily, the odds of such a precise alignment are very low. Nevertheless, astronomers keep a watchful eye on WR104.

The star that refused to die

iPTF14hls, a supernova first spotted in 2014. Initially, it began to fade as predicted, following the usual stellar demise script. But then, something extraordinary happened — PTF14hls defied its cosmic obituary and started to brighten again, not once, but a staggering five times!

This resurrection act left astronomers utterly bewildered. To make matters even more mysterious, the spectrum of iPTF14hls, the rainbow of light it emitted, revealed an evolution ten times slower than any other observed supernova. It was as if the star was aging in slow motion.

Several theories have been proposed to explain this cosmic act and one of which is that the supernova might have hit surrounding material, making it light up again for a short time. Another idea is that iPTF14hls could be a huge star losing its outer layers in an effort to avoid collapsing. However, these ideas don’t fully explain the strange behaviour of this star.

MY Camelopardalis

At first glance, MY Camelopardalis appears to be a fairly ordinary variable star. However, upon closer inspection, astronomers discovered a truly unique situation.

MY Camelopardalis is actually a binary system, two stars locked in a tight gravitational force. But what makes this pair so special is their extreme closeness. They orbit each other at a staggering speed of over a million kilometres per hour! This intimate dance has a profound effect on both stars. Their atmospheres are starting to merge.

Astronomers believe that MY Camelopardalis is the precursor to a spectacular event — a stellar merger. Over time, these two stars will eventually combine into a single, super-massive star exceeding 60 solar masses. This merger is thought to be the birth process of super-giant stars, the most massive stars in the universe.

A star older than time?

The discovery of HD 140283, a subgiant star in the 1950s, left scientists scratching their heads as they found out the star appeared to be 16 billion years old — two billion years older than the universe itself!

Located 190 light-years from Earth, further investigations on HD 140283 revealed its age to be a more reasonable 13.7 billion years, however, still incredibly ancient.

After more studies, scientists found that HD 140283 contains a remarkably low amount of iron compared to our Sun. This lack of heavy elements suggests that the star formed when the universe was still young and hadn’t yet been filled with these elements created by exploding stars. Studying HD 140283’s chemicals could help scientists learn more about what the early universe was like right after the Big Bang.

Tabby’s star: a star with a dimmer switch!

Imagine a lightbulb that keeps getting dimmer and brighter for no reason. At first you would think power fluctuation, which is likely possible, but this is not the case with Tabby’s Star (KIC 8462852).

Located roughly 1,500 light-years away from Earth, even after comprehensive studies, scientists still can’t figure out why it keeps changing its brightness. Unlike most stars, whose brightness remains relatively constant, Tabby’s Star shows sudden and unpredictable drops in brightness, going down by as much as 22%! This unusual dimming is hard to explain.

These are just a handful of the strange stars that we have covered, there are trillions of stars and other cosmic phenomena that remind us that our universe is a far stranger and more wondrous place than we can ever imagine.

So the next time you look at the night sky, remember that the tiny twinkling stars may not be as ordinary as they seem. Some might hold the secrets of ancient times, while others hold weird surprises waiting to be discovered.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 17th, 2024