Now imagine three suns in the sky. This is the story for a ... Today, we observe that the blue lurker is orbiting a white dwarf star—the burned out remains of the massive merger.

What is that bright white star in the sky? Whether you’re an early riser or you’ve been driving after dark in recent weeks, there have been two very bright “stars” shining in the east.

Astrophysicists have unearthed a surprising diversity in the ways in which white dwarf stars explode in deep space after assessing almost 4,000 such events captured in detail by a next-gen ...