Roughly 380 light years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpio, lies a trigger-happy star system called AR Scorpii. Every 1.97 minutes, it dramatically bursts out with a pulse of light four times brighter than its normal flux, leading astronomers to originally classify it as a lone variable star.But new research published in Nature has revealed that AR Scorpii is actually made up of two stars: A white dwarf and red dwarf that orbit each other every 3.6 hours. Using observations from several observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the authors discovered that violent interactions between these two bodies are the real cause of its radiant bursts of light."AR Scorpii was discovered over 40 years ago, but its true nature was not suspected until we started observing it in June 2015," said University of Warwick astrophysicist Tom Marsh, who led the research, in a statement. "We realised we were seeing something extraordinary the more we progressed with our observations."White dwarfs are the dead bodies of exploded stars; highly magnetic stellar remnants about the size of Earth, but 200,000 times more massive. The white dwarf within AR Scorpii is spinning so rapidly that it kicks off electrons at relativistic speeds, approaching the speed of light.These highly energetic particles coalesce into epic beams of radiation that thrash the white dwarf's companion, a red dwarf about as third as large as the Sun. The red dwarf lights up like a cosmic bulb with each lash, barfing out light from the ultraviolet to the radio—a phenomenon that has never been observed before in white dwarfs."We've known about pulsing neutron stars for nearly fifty years, and some theories predicted white dwarfs could show similar behaviour," said Boris Gänsicke, a co-author on the paper. "It's very exciting that we have discovered such a system, and it has been a fantastic example of amateur astronomers and academics working together."