This NASA/JPL news story plunges into Gothic territory as it describes deep space. The article describes X-ray emissions from the Sagittarius A* region, or as the headline puts it:
NASA's NuSTAR Captures Possible 'Screams' from Zombie Stars
Or, a touch more prosaically, yet still clinging to a horror perspective,
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has spotted a mysterious glow of high-energy X-rays that, according to scientists, could be the "howls" of dead stars as they feed on stellar companions.
It's a very Lovecraftian take on possible pulsars. Call it the necrotic model of stellar decomposition:
Astronomers have four theories to explain the baffling X-ray glow, three of which involve different classes of stellar corpses. When stars die, they don't always go quietly into the night. Unlike stars like our sun, collapsed dead stars that belong to stellar pairs, or binaries, can siphon matter from their companions. This zombie-like "feeding" process differs depending on the nature of the normal star, but the result may be an eruption of X-rays.
Or the lyrical version:
Another theory points to small black holes that slowly feed off their companion stars, radiating X-rays as material plummets down into their bottomless pits.
Read this story with mandatory musical accompaniment:
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