Quiet White Dwarf Sparks Mysterious Bow Shock

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope observed a glowing bow shock around the white dwarf RXJ0528+2838 in a binary system, even though the star shows no accretion disc or obvious outflow. The shock, visible in red, green, and blue, appears to have been powered for about 1,000 years, challenging standard models of how matter moves in such systems. A strong magnetic field could be funneling material from the companion directly onto the dead star without forming a disc, but this mechanism, if real, would only partly explain the phenomenon, leaving the exact origin of the outflow a mystery as reported in Nature Astronomy.