Space probe finds a tail on star that may tell tale

Cats have them, dogs have them, even baby frogs have them.

But a star with a tail? That was a new one for California Institute of Technology scientist Christopher Martin.

“I was shocked when I first saw this completely unexpected, humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star,” Martin said this week.

The star is Mira, which means wonderful in Latin. Mira’s tail is 13 light years long, three times as far as the distance to our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft scanned the star and its protuberance as part of its survey of the heavens in ultraviolet light.

Mira is giving scientists a unique opportunity to see how dying stars seed the birth of new stars and solar systems. As the star hurtles along, it sheds carbon, oxygen and other elements needed to create new stars and planets.

Billions of years ago, Mira was much like our own sun. As it aged, it swelled into a red giant. Eventually, it will become a white dwarf, the smallish core of the original star.

“This is an utterly new phenomenon to us,” said Mark Seibert, an astronomer with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. “We hope to be able to read Mira’s tail like a ticker tape to learn about the star’s life.”