"It's like looking back in time in a sense, to that violent period of our solar system when it was less than a billion years old."
The nova eruptions come about when a white dwarf steals too much matter from a close red giant companion.
"With ALMA, we can now see the atmosphere of a dying star with a level of clarity in a similar way to what we do for the sun."
"It’s kind of a jigsaw puzzle where all the different pieces are moving."
The Very Large Telescope's SPHERE instrument captured unprecedented images of 51 dusty rings shaping young planetary systems.
Astronomers are just beginning to scratch the surface of the complex, and sometimes violent, relationships between planets and their parent stars.
Regular stars collapse and die once they run out of fuel for their nuclear reactions, but the white dwarfs just sit there, hanging out, for eternity.
"Throwing a close companion into the mix could possibly wreak further havoc on the already complicated processes surrounding these stars."
"Astronomers have wanted to spot a coronal mass ejection on another star for decades. We’ve now managed to do this for the first time."
This new analysis could be used to test the physics of quantum chromodynamics in the future.
