I found an article on CNN the other day talking about an event that took place in outer space that has left scientist baffled.I know this may be boring to some people but I find it amazing that we still have so much to learn about space and even our own planet. I'm also taking an astrophysics course this semester so that helped spark some interest too. Well anyway, I pasted the article below if anyone is interested.
Faded star defies description
Astronomers have no idea what EF Eridanus is now
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Some stars take, some give.
Then there is the tortured relationship in EF Eridanus, where the smaller of two stars gave so much to its larger companion that it reached a dead end, and scientists said on Tuesday they haven't seen anything like it.
Doomed to orbit its more energetic partner for millions of years, the burned-out star has lost so much mass that it can no longer sustain nuclear fusion at its core and has become a new, indeterminate stellar object, astronomers said in a statement.
"Like the classic line about the aggrieved partner in a romantic relationship, the smaller donor star gave, and gave, and gave some more until it had nothing left to give," said astronomer Steve Howell, who works with the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO telescope and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
"Now the donor star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star," Howell said. "There's no true category for an object in such limbo."
The binary system EF Eridanus is made up of a recipient, a faint white dwarf star -- a sunlike star that has progressed to the final phase of its life -- and the donor object, which has about one-twentieth of our sun's mass.
It is located about 300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus (The River). A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.
Howell and Thomas Harrison of New Mexico State University made high-precision infrared measurements of EF Eridanus using the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes, both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, in December 2002 and September 2003, respectively.
EF Eridanus is a type of binary star system known as magnetic cataclysmic variables, which may produce many more of these "dead" objects than scientists previously realized, Harrison said.
Images are available online at http:/www.gemini.edu/EFEriImages. | 
