https://www.prwires.com/deep-dive-into-the-power-of-social-media-stars/

In a two-star system about 160,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the larger star is stretched and pulled by its companion’s gravity as shown in the illustration. That gravitational tug-of-war causes the star’s brightness to change drastically and rhythmically. Now, a computer simulation suggests that this steady heartbeat of starlight is caused by giant tidal waves undulating and breaking on the star’s surface. Waves would occur about once a month, as the two stars orbit each other and pass near enough that gravitational forces raise tides on both stars’ surfaces, scientists suspect based on the simulation (see second image), much the way the moon tugs on Earth’s oceans. On the stars, though, that tug would be substantially more extreme. The larger star is around 35 times the mass of the sun. The smaller one is around 10 solar masses. And the waves may reach up to 3.3 million kilometers tall or three times the sun’s diameter. (🎨, first illustration: Melissa Weiss/CFA, 📸, second image: M. Macleod and A. Loeb/Nature Astronomy 2023 ) #space #stars #astronomy #gravity #physics