Ylva Götberg and Maria Drout

If there is one part of astro­physics that we would all expect to be neatly tied up in terms of our understanding, it would be the theory of stellar evolution. However, there still remain some key puzzles, like the paucity of theoretically predicted hot helium stars whose hydrogen envelopes have been stripped, likely by a partner star that devoured them. Astronomers Ylva Götberg and Maria Drout devised a brand-new strategy to hunt for them. This talented team of an observer and a theorist collaborated to generate detailed model predictions and then went looking for candidates, leveraging telescopes on the ground and in space. Their work successfully detected 25 examples of these predicted stars—only one had been known to exist previously. The discovery has very important consequences for our understanding of the number of core-collapse supernovae and neutron stars in the universe—stars which, when close together, can merge to generate tremors in space-time.
Natarajan, a theoretical astro­physicist, is a professor at Yale University