A stellar fight between two stars has been captured in stunning imagery.

Telescopes in Chile recently captured a fight between two stars, including the moment one star swallowed the other.

Through their observations, astronomers found that one star had grown so large it engulfed the other which, in turn, spiralled towards its partner, provoking it into shedding its outer layers.

The European Southern Observatory released the satellite images in a media release on Wednesday, after a study about the intriguing incident was also published in journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this 'death process' was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant," Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden said. Olofsson led the recent study.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescopes in Chile and data, astronomers spotted a gas cloud that had resulted from the clash in the star system HD101584.

They found that as the main star puffed up into a red giant, it grew large enough to swallow its lower-mass partner.

In response, the smaller star spiralled in towards the giant's core but didn't collide with it. Rather, this manoeuvre triggered the larger star into an outburst, leaving its gas layers dramatically scattered and its core exposed.

The astronomers say that the complex structure of the gas in the HD101584 nebula was due to the smaller star spiralling towards the red giant, as well as to the jets of gas that formed in the process.

As a deadly blow to the already defeated gas layers, these jets blasted through the previously ejected material, forming the rings of gas and the bright bluish and reddish blobs seen in the nebula.

In the release, astronomers said that the stellar fight would help them better understand the final evolution of stars like the Sun.

"Currently, we can describe the death processes common to many Sun-like stars, but we cannot explain why or exactly how they happen," the study's co-author Sofia Ramstedt said.

"HD101584 gives us important clues to solve this puzzle since it is currently in a short transitional phase between better studied evolutionary stages. With detailed images of the environment of HD101584 we can make the connection between the giant star it was before, and the stellar remnant it will soon become."