A rare tear star and its invisible partner are bound to detonate into an enormous supernova.

Astronomers have discovered a rare star in whirling tears in the cosmos at around 1500 light-years from the sun.

He is in a poisonous relationship with a partner who is literally ripping the life from his body. There is no friendly dissociation in stellar relations such as these; the romance does not end until the two stars explode in a violent thermonuclear explosion visible throughout the galaxy.

But astronomers (cosmic paparazzi as they are) are excited by this twisted stellar relation. The star system, named HD265435, is one of only three known binary star systems in the universe — and the closest one to Earth — that is clearly destined to end in a Type IA supernova, according to a study published July 12 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

These types of stellar explosions occur when a white dwarf (the shriveled husk of an old, collapsed star) shares an orbit with a larger, younger star that still has some fuel left to burn. Small but gravitationally massive, the white dwarf gladly gobbles up this fuel, yanking so much matter away from its companion that the younger star begins to change shape from a sphere into an ellipse, or teardrop. The older star grows more and more over millions of years, eventually becoming too great for its own good. The nuclear reactions start up again in its nucleus, the dwarf goes boom and the two stars become an irradiated spot of gas and dust in the night sky.

Supernovas are easy enough to spot once the blast goes off (one infamous explosion lingered in Earth's sky for 23 days and nights in A.D. 1054), but finding the doomed star systems that lead to Type IA explosions is much trickier. This is in part because white dwarves are extremely weak and small, wrapping the mass of a song in a bullet about as wide as Earth, according to NASA.

Finding a dwarf ill-fated companion star isn't much easier, but because these younger stars tend to be much brighter, they offer a few telltale clues, the authors of the new study wrote. One is an "ellipsoidal" shape, suggesting that something massive pulls off one side of the star and distorts it. Another indicator is a luminous signature with fast pulses, which refers to a binary system where two stars are in extremely narrow and fast orbit.

Using observations from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite, the researchers discovered that HD265435 met the two requirements. From these details, the team calculated the brightest star's distance and mass, which allowed the researchers to make some informed estimates about the size and age of the young star’s invisible companion star.

The team discovered that the visible star contains about 60 percent of the sun's mass, suggesting that the visible star is not far from collapsing into a white dwarf itself. The invisible companion of the star, on the other hand, adapts perfectly to the profile of the white dwarf, enveloping a rough solar mass in a sphere slightly smaller than Earth.

These two stars orbit completely every 90 minutes, indicating they are extremely close together and are likely to fuse completely in millions of years. Together, the pair has the overall right mass to suggest that an IA-type supernova is on the horizon - about 70 million years away, the authors concluded.

Of course, none of us will be there to watch the star duo collapse (or rather disintegrate). But finding real-world examples of binary systems doomed to go boom is no easy feat, and studying them could help astronomers better understand the still-mysterious mechanisms that power these tremendous cosmic explosions. Perhaps sadly for HD265435, this means that the paparazzi lenses of Earth's space telescopes will be drawn upon the disordered relationship of the star system for generations to come.