Astronomers are blaming a 'greedy neighbor.'
, whose main mission ran from 2009 to 2013. During that period, Kepler was pointed continuously at a spot in the constellation Cygnus, allowing it to measure brightness variations in tens of thousands of red giant stars, the same category that ourRevisiting these observations, the team found two kinds of unusual red giant stars: one with lower masses and one that shines less brightly.
The very low-mass stars contain only about half the mass of the sun. Given the typical size of a red giant, the researchers said this mass loss could only be explained in one of two ways. One would be very slow and gradual loss, but that process would take longer than the age of the universe and thus be impossible.
That left what the team referred to as a"greedy neighbor," meaning a white dwarf pulling mass away from the red giant, as the only possible explanation for low-mass red giants.The second unusual type was"underluminous stars," which have normal masses, up to twice that of the sun. However, these stars appear to be smaller and fainter than modeling would suggest. The stars are also rare, as only seven of this type were found in the Kepler data.
The rareness of the stars, along with the lack of apparent explanation for their weight loss by normal physical processes, caused researchers to conclude that, again, a hidden companion must be stealing away mass from the underluminous stars. The researchers probed the stars using asteroseismology, or the study of stellar vibrations, to give more information about their properties, including evolutionary stage, mass and size.
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