1 Every 20 years or so, the red giant star dumps enough hydrogen gas onto its companion white dwarf star to set off a brilliant thermonuclear explosion on the white dwarf's surface.

2 About 200 light-years distant, Mirach is a red giant star, cooler than the Sun but much larger and so intrinsically much brighter than our parent star.

3 An artist's rendering shows a Jupiter-like planet being engulfed by an expanding red giant star.

4 In another paper in the same issue, a different research team reports using Kepler data to detect a system of three stars, which includes a red giant star and two red dwarfs.

5 Billions of years ago Mira was likely similar to our Sun, but has now become a swollen red giant star , its outer layers of material blowing off into interstellar space.

6 You can literally see the shock coming through the undisturbed atmosphere of the red giant star and then the subsequent expansion of that star, " Nugent said."

7 Our Sun is between the lightweight and heavyweight stars. The red giant star at the bottom of the graphic is much larger than the other stars in the illustration.

8 At 3 o'clock in the morning on that date, Mars will rise in the eastern sky alongside the red giant star Aldebaran .