Name this star: “It’s 5000 light years away, it’s a binary, it’s two old stars, one puffy and bloated, the other tiny and compressed, and one is eating the other while the other blows off a wind, and the tiny one periodically explodes, and forms a peanut-shaped soap bubbly nephroidal shell, which we can observe and model…”
RS Oph, of course, as excellently summed up by our friend the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.
lolife 