The Corpse of a Dead Star Zaps Its Companion With a Death Ray

380 light years from Earth lies a very bizarre binary star. Called AR Scorpii (or AR Sco for short) It's been known for decades, but was masquerading as a relatively humdrum variable, a single star that changes its brightness due to pulsations, literally an expansion and contraction of its size. But there was something odd about it. Instead of a nice, smooth brightening and dimming, a team of astronomers noticed that it has a lot of scatter in its brightness, a lot of apparently random noise on ...