This summer, a dead star in a nearby galaxy flared back to life in an abnormally brilliant but brief nova, providing astronomers a fleeting glimpse of a mysterious class of stellar duo.
In May, an array of asteroid-watching telescopes on Earth spotted an outburst nestled in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors which is home to four of only six known binary star systems featuring a white dwarf and a hot, young star surrounded by a disk of material. Astronomers expect such binaries to be common across the universe, yet only a handful of members have been cataloged so far.
