Gravitational forces between two orbiting stars might be creating huge waves of plasma on one of the stars that break and crash to the surface.
On the stars, though, that tug would be substantially more extreme. “Instead of being a few meters tall, [the tide] can be 10 percent of the diameter of the star” that’s visible, says astrophysicist Jim Fuller of Caltech, who was not part of the study. On a star as big as that visible star — about 24 times as wide as the sun — that corresponds to a tidal wave roughly 3.3 million kilometers tall.
The new study, Fuller says, “shows how complicated and interesting the dynamics get when you have an extreme system like this.” Astronomers can’t see the shapes of these stars through a telescope. but they can track how the brighter star’s light changes over time. While the brightness of most known “heartbeat stars” changes by about a tenth of a percent, the brightness of this system changes by 20 percent.Roughly once a month, two stars about 160,000 light-years away from Earth pass close enough to one another that gravitational forces should raise tides in the plasma on both stars’ surfaces.
The waves can get big enough that they actually break and crash across the brighter star’s surface, the study suggests. When an ocean wave is far from shore, it’s a rolling, undulating wave. But as it comes closer to shore, it rises and collapses on itself. “Something kind of parallel is happening here,” MacLeod says. The top of the wave steepens, “gets out of phase with the bottom, and it folds over on itself, and it crashes.
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