Astronomers spot giant cannonballs shooting from star

​Washington: Using NASA's Hubble space telescope data, scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star.

The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon, NASA said in a statement on Thursday.

Astronomers have estimated that this stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years.

"We knew this object had a high-speed outflow from previous data, but this is the first time we are seeing this process in action," said lead author of the study Raghvendra Sahai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The fireballs present a puzzle to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, called V Hydrae.

The star is a bloated red giant, residing 1,200 light years away and which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes.

Red giants are dying stars in the late stages of life that are exhausting their nuclear fuel that makes them shine. They have expanded in size and are shedding their outer layers into space. The current best explanation suggests the plasma balls were launched by an unseen companion star.

According to this theory, the companion would have to be in an elliptical orbit that carries it close to the red giant's puffed-up atmosphere every 8.5 years.

As the companion enters the bloated star's outer atmosphere, it gobbles up material. This material then settles into a disk around the companion, and serves as the launching pad for blobs of plasma, which travel at roughly a half-million miles per hour.