A Star’s Death Throes Involves a Lot of Kicking

Hubble captures the planetary nebula NGC 2440, the gas cast off by a dying star in exactly the kind of lopsided, uneven ejections that give it a recoil kick. The star itself, now a white dwarf, is the white dot at the centre (Credit : NASA, ESA, and K. Noll (STScI))

When stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives, the textbook story has them puffing up and quietly shedding their outer layers to leave a white dwarf behind. A new model suggests it is far less serene than that. As dying stars eject mass asymmetrically, each burst delivers a tiny recoil, and over hundreds of thousands of years roughly ten thousand of these kicks add up to send the star drifting through space at a respectable speed. The idea neatly explains why wide binary star systems tend to fall apart once one star becomes a white dwarf, and it hints at something more dramatic still waiting to be confirmed

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