In new research, scientists say that earlier in its lifetime, this star transferred abnormally high amounts of mass to its binary companion — so much so that it was not left with enough material for an explosive death.

Instead, it ended in a quiet "ultra-stripped" supernova, a rare cosmic event that leaves a super-dense remnant called a neutron star in its wake.

Researchers of the latest study have now increased that estimate to 10, noting that these observations help them better understand the history, evolution and atypically calm deaths of stars in such systems.

Clarissa Pavao, an undergraduate student at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, found the system while scouring data captured by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

In this process, however, the star lost so much mass that its end-of-life supernova "didn't even have enough energy to kick the orbit into the more typical elliptical shape seen in similar binaries," Noel Richardson, an astronomer at Embry-Riddle and lead author of the new study, said in a statement.

Millions of years from now, the team predicts that the two neutron stars will spiral slowly toward each other in a cosmic dance, ultimately colliding in a kilonova explosion.