An enormous, ongoing cosmic "fart" is causing a mysterious zombie star to flare up repeatedly, shining bright pulses of X-rays toward Earth, a new study reveals. The unprecedented observations shed light on how some of the universe's most extreme objects interact with one another. Around 13,000 light-years from Earth lies an unusual binary star system, known as BP Crucis. It contains a blue hypergiant star roughly 60 times larger than the sun, dubbed Wray 977, alongside a neutron star — the undead and ultradense remains of a star that exploded via a supernova — that astronomers have labeled GX 301-2. This stellar "zombie," which contains the same mass as our home star packed into an object r...