Zhicun Liu

The birth of a star is like cooking in a giant cosmic oven. First, an icy cloud of cosmic dust and gas contracts, and a thermonuclear fire ignites in the center, but it's still hidden behind a dense layer of 'flour'. It can only be seen in thermal rays — the dust heats up and glows, giving away the core.

Two spinning tops whirl so close they nearly touch. One is scorching blue, the other dim white. Together they complete a full orbit in twenty hours. This is the pair Feige 64: a blue star with a mass of just a third of the Sun's, and a white dwarf, the cooled core of a former star, one and a half times heavier than our Sun. The blue star seems too hot for its mass.