A star A goes through the body of another star B, or is swallowed by B. There is no tidal disruption.
It sounds like kerzan. Does anybody recognise this pronunciation?
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Sign up to join this communityA star A goes through the body of another star B, or is swallowed by B. There is no tidal disruption.
It sounds like kerzan. Does anybody recognise this pronunciation?
The term you're searching for is probably accretion (I guess it might sound similar to a kerzan if the speaker had a cold or the listener couldn't hear it well enough for other reasons). This term is not limited to close binary stars (accreting binaries) cannibalizing each other because they orbit each other at such proximity that the L1 Lagrange point between them extends into their own Roche lobe, they form accretion disks connected through an accretion stream, and they feed off each other (thus why this is often referred to as cannibalism):
Artist's conception shows an accreting binary at the center of the globular cluster NGC 6624 (Source: U. of Tennessee AstroWiki)
Some examples of accreting binaries are symbiotic novae, X-ray binaries, microquasars, X-ray pulsars, and so on. See links for more examples and explanations. Other examples of accretion include stellar accretion of planetary materials of a planet in a low altitude orbit around its parent star, formation of planets via accretion of materials of the protoplanetary disk, active galactic nucleus (AGN) like quasars (could also sound similar), novae, and e.g. the Earth still accretes on average ~ 110 metric tons of new materials per day, too.
Is it possible you refer to a Thorne–Żytkow object ? This is literally a star within another star, more specifically a compact object (Neutron star) inside a giant star (red giant or supergiant).
As far as I know, this is an only theoretical object, it has never been observed.
In the original paper from the authors, they provide some observable characteristics of these objects, like some peculiar emission lines. You can imagine the chemistry of such an object would be really unique.
Here an article for a possible identification link 1, very recent work (2014).
And here some calculations link2.