In this season of ghouls and goblins, it turns out even space agencies can get swept up in the Halloween spirit. Two years ago, NASA treated us all with an image of the sun resembling a jack-o-lantern. Last year, the organization told us about the Great Pumpkin asteroid heading our way for Halloween. And now, NASA has just dropped news about pumpkin stars, fiery balls of gas that spin so fast that they squash down from perfect spheres to shapes that do in fact resemble the fruit millions of people carve up every October.
In fact, astronomers using observations from NASA's Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a whole batch of rapidly spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from our Sun. The stars, which spin so fast they've been squashed into pumpkin-like shapes, are thought to be the result of close binary systems where two sun-like stars merge.
"These 18 stars rotate in just a few days on average, while the sun takes nearly a month," said Steve Howell, a senior research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and leader of the team. "The rapid rotation amplifies the same kind of activity we see on the sun, such as sunspots and solar flares, and essentially sends it into overdrive."
The most extreme member of the group, a K-type orange giant dubbed KSw 71, is more than 10 times larger than the sun, rotates in just 5.5 days, and produces X-ray emissions 4,000 times greater than the sun does at solar maximum.
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