Cannibal stars like their food hot!

[FLO]

ESA’s XMM-Newton has seen vast clouds of superheated gas, whirling around miniature stars and escaping from being devoured by the stars’ enormous gravitational fields - giving a new insight into the eating habits of the galaxy’s ‘cannibal’ stars.

The clouds of gas range in size from a few hundred thousand kilometres to a few million kilometres, ten to one hundred times larger than the Earth. They are composed of iron vapour and other chemicals at temperatures of many millions of degrees.

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