A team of researchers at Queen’s University, Canada, have discovered the first ever massive binary star, epsilon Lupi, in which both stars are having their own magnetic fields. Researchers hope their discovery can provide them direction to find out how magnetic fields are generated in massive stars.

As per a report from the Queen’s Gazette, a binary star is a star system consisting of two or more stars, orbiting around their common centre of mass.

Matt Shultz from Queens University, located in Ontario, Canada, was the first to discover the two giant stars in that binary system. He presented his findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Shultz said, “The origin of magnetism amongst massive stars is something of a mystery and this discovery may help to shed some light on the question of why these stars have magnetic fields”.

The research showed that the strengths of the magnetic fields are almost same in both the stars. But their magnetic axes are anti-aligned, with the south pole of one star pointing in approximately the same direction as the North Pole of the other.

They are presently not sure why this is so, but it probably points to something significant about how the stars are interacting with one another. They need to collect more data, said Shultz.

So far two explanations have been proposed for the origin of massive star magnetic fields, both are linked on the idea of fossil’ magnetic field, which is generated at some point in the star's past and then locked in to the star's outer portion.