APOD: 2021 August 22 - Explosions from White Dwarf Star RS Oph

Good morning, Rallypoint. Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is titled "Explosions from White Dwarf Star RS Oph." Last Monday (August 16th), the APOD featured a Perseid Meteor, Red Sprites, and noted the observable presence of RS Oph in a nova state. Today we see an artist's depiction of the physics that might be playing out some 5,000 light years away from us. RS Oph is the name of a binary star system, where a white dwarf star (up to 8 times the mass of our Sun but is only the size of the Earth) is accompanied by a second star. You can see the white dwarf in the center of the accretion disk formed by matter pulled (by gravity) from the nearby red-giant star. Once sufficient mass is present, the elevated temperatures of the white dwarf ignite, producing the nova visible today.