There’s an incredibly exciting new paper out now from the UW Massive Stars research group! Led by Lauryn Williams, a UW astronomy PhD student and NSF Fellow, this research has produced the VERY FIRST models that successfully simulation formation of a dynamically-stable Thorne-Zytkow object! We discovered the first serious candidate for detection of a TZO – a star that outwardly looks like a red supergiant but has a neutron star for a core – a decade (!) ago and since then the question of how these stars actually form, and whether they can survive, has been a huge research topic and the subject of a lot of really exciting work. Lauryn’s simulations are the first to successfully produce what we call a “dynamical TZO”: an object where a neutron star successfully merges with a companion and produces a surviving stable star! This is done via what’s referred to as the “impact scenario”, where a newborn neutron star receives a velocity kick from the supernova that makes it and goes hurtling into its companion. Done in collaboration with Philip Chang at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (gotta love teamwork between the different UWs!), this is the one of several components of Lauryn’s PhD thesis, which is focused on rigorous and multi-faceted theoretical tests of TZO formation and evolution. The paper has been accepted to ApJ, and you can now find it on arXiv.