I Vant to Drink Your Gaseous Stellar Matter...

Scientists have been studying a binary star system about 25,000 light years from Earth called V445, in the constellation Puppis.

This may have been one of the later-named constellations, as puppis in Latin translates to "poop deck" of a ship -- the raised deck at the rear. I'm figuring they were really reaching for them if they were naming constellations after ship decks. Some planets have been found orbiting stars in Puppis and we'd better hope they are uninhabited, because anyone who lives on them might be kind of ticked off when they learn what constellation we put them in: "You say this word 'poop' also means what? Your mom! And also, die, earthling scum!"

Anyway, V445 has been shown to have what's called a bipolar shell, and I can think of too many jokes for that to pick just one. What that phrase means in astronomy is a shell of gas expanding in two different directions that signals the star has gone nova or exploded. The reason it's done so is that this so-called "vampire star" has sucked the matter out of its companion star and now shines brighter than its "donor."

And again, it would be a good idea if no one lived near this star, because when we look at its vampire act, we're seeing what it actually did some 25,000 years ago, when human beings first moved into southern Greece and into upper North America via the Bering Strait land bridge. Which means their star was a vampire long before Stephenie Meyer wrote her Twilight Saga and we would have a real dilly of a copyright infringement lawsuit on our hands.