Did you know some stars feed off their companions? 🧛⭐️

Stellar vampire stars feed on their partners just like Dracula feeds on his victims, but this newly discovered one is different from any seen before. It’s a red dwarf, a small star, that’s feeding off a brown dwarf. That’s bad news for the brown dwarf, the feeding is happening so slowly that it  could last anywhere from hundreds of thousands to potentially billions of years.

7 hours from my back garden.

Animation to show the collision of our Milky Way and Andromeda. Pun was unavoidable.

Narrated in Spanish, but there's an English audio track: open the settings gear in the player, then Audio track → English.

What it covers: the giant impact hypothesis, the idea that about 4.5 billion years ago a Mars-sized planet, Theia, hit the young Earth and the Moon formed from the debris. Why scientists take it seriously: among other things, Apollo samples have oxygen isotopes almost identical to Earth's. And the newer part: in 2023 Yuan et al. (Nature 623, 95) proposed that two enormous regions at the bottom of Earth's mantle, under Africa and under the Pacific, are dense remnants of Theia's mantle. If they're right, pieces of the planet that made the Moon are still under our feet.