NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Has Detected Twice the Size of Mars “Canon Fire” Flying From the Red Giant Star V Hydrae

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected stellar "canon fire" flying from the red giant star V Hydrae. Each fireball was twice the size of the planet Mars and it travels so fast in the space that it would take only 30 minutes to travel from earth to the moon. This fireball has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

Astronomers knew that this detected canon fire had this high-speed rate from the previous data but this is their first time to see the process in action for 11 years since STIS was used to detect huge "cannonballs" firing from the red giant star V Hydrae, 1,200 light-years away.

A red giant star is a dying star in the last stages of stellar evolution that exhausting nuclear fuel that makes them shines. They have expanded in size and are shedding their outer layers into space. It has been belief that in only a few billion years, our own sun will turn into a red giant star, expand and engulf the inner planets, possibly even Earth.

Astronomers were puzzled with these canon fires as they we're surprised because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, V Hydrae.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported, "The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star. According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years. As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.

This star system could be the archetype to explain a dazzling variety of glowing shapes uncovered by Hubble that is seen around dying stars, called planetary nebulae, researchers say.

A planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gas expelled by a star late in its life.

The team's results appeared in the August 20, 2016, issue of The Astrophysical Journal.