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Twinkle, twinkle, giant stars! Pairs of so-called ‘heartbeat’ stars change their brightness like the rhythm of a beating heart. For the first time, new models show that they also create gigantic waves.

Heartbeat stars spend most of their lives orbiting far away from each other. But occasionally, they swing close together. Each star’s gravity then pulls on the other’s surface, creating tides and waves.

Unlike ocean tides on Earth, star tides are made of superheated plasma. The tides pull and stretch the stars’ shapes, flinging off glowing gases and changing the amount of starlight we can observe from Earth.

Two astrophysicists from Harvard University, Morgan MacLeod and Abraham Loeb, have identified a special heartbeat pair called MACHO 80.7443.1718. The changes in brightness in this pair of stars are 200 times greater than typical pairs. When the smaller star of the pair passes its larger buddy, its gravity creates plasma tides as tall as 3 of our Suns stacked together across the bigger star.

“Each crash of the star’s towering tidal waves releases enough energy to disintegrate our entire planet several hundred times over,” Morgan says.