Bad Astronomy | Astronomers discover a new type of star: BLAPs
http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/astronomers-discover-a-new-type-of-star-blaps
t’s not every day (or night, I suppose) that astronomers discover a new kind of star. In this case, it’s not so much that the stars are totally different from other stars,
and if you saw one you’d know right away something was amiss. Instead, these stars behave differently, in a way never seen before. And because of that, it took a special
kind of survey to even find them at all.
The stars are called Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators, or BLAPs, an acronym that is both ridiculous and makes me very happy. They’re called this because a) they’re blue,
and 2) they pulsate, changing in brightness by the relatively large amount of 20 – 45%. That’s a lot. If the Sun did this we’d be alternately cooked and frozen.
Not only that, but these stars brighten and dim really quickly: They can go from one extreme to the other and back again in just over 20 minutes. Of the dozen or so found,
the shortest one pulses with a period of 23 minutes, and the longest 39. That’s incredibly fast. These are stars: Vast spinning balls of gas that tip the cosmic scales at
an octillion tons or ten. Changing something that size that rapidly and by that much is fearsome.
