There is a most curious paper out on CU Virginis
CU Virginis is a magnetic chemically peculiar star about 250 light years away.
By peculiar, we mean it has significant overabundance of some elements (factors of ten or more), and the surface composition is visibly inhomogenous and variable.
It is rotating rapidly, period of just over half-a-day, and the rotation axis is approximately orthogonal to our line of sight, while the magnetic field is dipolar, off-center, and approximately orthogonal to the rotation axis.
There is strong radio emission from the stellar magnetosphere, and as it rotates, the radio beam sweeps across our line of sight, much like a lighthouse beam.
The radiation has a narrow beamed component - half hour width beams, which are 100% right hand circularly polarized.
The paper also claims, based on a small number of observations over a short baseline, that the star is spinning down very rapidly, presumably through magnetic braking. The star has previously been observed to abruptly increase its rotational period.
Weird shit.
The authors suggest the star is undergoing rapid spin-down at it heads down to the settle on to the main-sequence, and that the radio emission is an interesting model for coherent radio emission in pulsars.
Interesting, though I am skeptical as to how far the latter analogy will stretch.
Fascinating that it behaves like a pulsar. Last month it was discovered that brown dwarf TVLM 513 also behaves like a pulsar. Could these discoveries be related?
Which elements are peculiar?
in this particular star, silicon, chromium, iron and helium, for sure
for the class in general, everything up to mercury, including spectacular overabundances of rare earth elements (by factors of million or more in some cases)
but for CU Vir I don't happen to know if those are measured to be peculiar and a very quick search did not reveal measured abundances
its somewhere, buried under its HD number or somesuch
If such a star were to have terrestrial planets, they would have extremely odd mineralogy.