Hubble Telescope Finds Rare Stars On Space

NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope managed to find an object named Blue Lurker. Although it sounds mysterious, this object is only a rare star in the open star cluster M67.

This rare star is about 2,800 light-years from Earth. According to Hubble data that scientists have observed, the star has a complicated life, where its life mixes with two other stars bound by one gravity.

This star is believed to be still connected to Blue Stragglers, hotter, brighter, and bluer stars. However, when compared to the stars around it, Blue Lurker rotates faster and has unusual behavior.

This object is called a Lurker or Reconnaissance because it blends with all the mass stars in the cluster. Not only lurking, this star also rotates rapidly because it 'measures' material from the companion star so that its rotation continues to grow.

The speed of Blue Lurker has been confirmed with NASA's Kepler Space Telescope data which has been out of service since 2018. From the data that has been studied, this star only takes four days to complete one round.

This is a very fast movement because stars, including the Sun, generally take about 30 days to complete one round. The process of evolution until its movement becomes very fast is considered so complicated.

"This star is really interesting because it is an example of an interacting star in a three-star system," said Emily Leiner of the Illinois Institute of Technology, quoted in a NASA report. "A very complicated (star) evolutionary story."

Although its evolution can be explained, Leiner said that he and his colleagues had not been able to connect all stages of evolution with reliable ones. According to him, "the triple star system is 10 percent of the stellar population like the Sun. However, compiling this evolutionary history is a challenge."