RY Scuting Along: Studying a Messy Binary

A long time ago in a binary far, far away, one star was growing while another was shrinking. Even though this actually happened 6000 years ago, the light from these events in the RY Scuti binary is just getting to us.
Right now we see one star dumping some of its mass onto its companion - active mass transfer and a messy transfer at that. I'll show you how we gleaned information about the two stars (such as masses) and determined that there is a 2000 A.U. double-ring nebula and a 1 A.U. circumbinary disk around the two stars, gas leaking from L2, and an accretion torus around the mass gainer. Eventually, one or both of these stars will go supernova.

Erika Grundstrom

Vanderbilt University