No matter how much of space we can discover and explore, the mind-blowing reality is that there is always more out there than we’re likely to ever reach.
Not only that, but what we have already found outside of our solar system is so vast and unreachable that we can’t even say we know for sure what’s really going on out there.
This might make one curious as to the possibilities of life beyond our world, but it also means that entire galaxies full of surprises can hide from us in plain sight.
However, it seems that at least one of those surprises has now revealed itself for an unlikely reason.
Two years ago, NASA launched a special satellite known as TESS that was intended to locate planets beyond our solar system.
But it turns out that the tech that allows it to get detailed photos of vast scenes from space isn’t just good for hunting down these exoplanets.
As you can see from this image taken by TESS, it can be hard to single out one of the thousands of stars it can capture at once.
As CNN reported , however, that’s precisely what some amateur astronomers did when they noticed something unusual in the data the satellite had captured.
Namely, a star about 1,500 light-years away that’s about 1.7 times the mass of our sun.
And when astronomers became aware of the star, now called HD74423, it didn’t look familiar to them either.
As Simon Murphy at the University of Sydney told CNN, “What first caught my attention was the fact it was a chemically peculiar star. Stars like this are usually fairly rich with metals — but this is metal poor, making it a rare type of hot star.”
But as this artist’s rendering shows, the star’s composition wasn’t the only way it stood out.
The star was seen pulsating on one side, but not the other.
Although the gasses churning under any star’s surface can cause these pulsations, it’s never happened in a way that hasn’t affected all sides of the star.
You’ll also notice its unusual teardrop shape, which is likely due to gravitational pull from the smaller red dwarf beside it.
But while it wasn’t such a huge mystery as to what was causing its shape and affecting its pulsations, the fact that the red dwarf was able to have such an extreme influence on it suggests that HD74423 is an entirely new type of star.
As Don Kurtz from the University of Central Lancashire said, “We’ve known theoretically that stars like this should exist since the 1980s. I’ve been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years and now we have finally found one.”
