When a star 'eats' gas from its neighbor, it stays bloated and puffy for millions of years afterward.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Thermally inflated accretors in post-mass transfer binaries: Abell 35 and its class revisited
arXiv · 2603.23756
The Takeaway
Astronomers have identified a weird class of stars that are far larger and brighter than they should be for their age. These 'inflated accretors' gorged themselves on material from a companion star and are now stuck in an oversized, rapidly spinning state that defies standard models of how stars are supposed to look.
From the abstract
A small but growing class of binaries containing hot ($T_{\rm eff}\sim10^5\rm~K$) white dwarfs (WDs) and rapidly rotating, apparently subgiant companions -- including the prototype, Abell 35 -- show companions that are too large and luminous to be ordinary main-sequence stars yet too numerous to be explained as finely tuned near-twin binaries. We argue that these stars are instead main-sequence accretors temporarily inflated out of thermal equilibrium by recent mass transfer. For the subgiant of