Astronauts Spot Incredibly Rare, Insanely Explosive Pair Of Stars!!

Astronomers at the ESO have announced an astonishingly unusual find.  A pair of double stars, dubbed VFTS 352, roughly 160,000 light years away in the Tarantula Nebula.  It happened because both stars were orbiting each other and while they were orbiting each other their gaseous envelopes touch.  Each is classified as an O-type star — and O-type stars are the rarest main sequence stars in the universe, comprising just 0.00003% of known stars. They’re extremely prone to going supernova and collapsing into black holes or neutron stars. Finding two of them 12 million kilometers apart and actively merging is amazing.  Right now, the stars of VFTS 352 are estimated to be sharing roughly 30% of their total mass between each other. No other overcontact binary is known to be this large or to share that great a percentage of its mass.  Right now, astronomers are predicting the star will die in one of two ways. Either the two stars will merge, forming a single giant and insanely unstable O-type star (possibly a hypergiant) before collapsing into a long-duration gamma ray burst (and incidentally, likely sterilizing every single planet within a non-trivial distance). Option #2 is If the stars are mixed well enough, they both remain compact and the VFTS 352 system may avoid merging. This would lead the objects down a new evolutionary path that is completely different from classic stellar evolution predictions. In the case of VFTS 352, the components would likely end their lives in supernova explosions, forming a close binary system of black holes.  Objects like  VFTS 352 are capable of causing extinction events across galactic distances.  Assuming the gamma-ray explosion to be spherical, the energy output of GRB 080319B would be within a factor of two of the rest-mass energy of the Sun (the energy which would be released were the Sun to be converted entirely into radiation).   

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/216779-astronauts-spot-incredibly-rare-insanely-explosive-pair-of-stars