MUNICH, Germany, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- European astronomers say they've obtained the best visual images ever of a star that has lost most of its material to a "vampire" companion.

By combining the light captured by several telescopes at the European Southern Observatory Paranal site in Chile, they created a virtual telescope more than 450 feet across, with vision 50 times sharper than the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and used it to capture images of the double star system SS Leporis, a release from ESO's Munich, Germany, headquarters said Wednesday.

"The images are so sharp that we can not only watch the stars orbiting around each other, but also measure the size of the larger of the two stars," lead study author Nicolas Blind said.

The two stars circle around each other in 260 days, at a distance only a little more than the distance between Earth and the sun. Because they are so close, the hotter and smaller of the two has already cannibalized about half the mass of the larger, cooler star.

Surprisingly, astronomers said, the new images show the transfer of mass from one star to the other in this double system is gentler than expected.

"We knew that this double star was unusual, and that material was flowing from one star to the other," co-author Henri Boffin from ESO said. "What we found, however, is that the way in which the mass transfer most likely took place is completely different from previous models of the process. The 'bite' of the vampire star is very gentle but highly effective."

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