(Viewed 1,007 times)

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Two Stars Gonna Crash Into Each Other

White Dwarfs in a Death Spiral

(May 31, 2005) New observations from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have discovered two white dwarf stars orbiting one another at a tremendous speed - they're only 80.000 km (50,000 miles) apart!

The rate at which they're orbiting is decreasing by 1.2 milliseconds every year, which means they're destined to eventually collide. What's important about this find is that the stars are probably creating gravity waves, as predicted by Einstein, and these gravity waves should increase as they get closer and closer.

More here at Universe Today: www.universetoday.com/am/publish/white_dwarfs_death_spiral.html?3152005

-------------

This is quite exciting and too bad I won't be able to see the two suns collide! I didn't catch how far these dwarfs are, but even as gravity waves travel at the speed of light, it will take quite while to reach us. But perhaps we can view the effects around the neighborhood of the dwarfs.

[Maddad]

www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/pr-06-02.html
This binary pair is aparently tidally locked, at least the lighter one to the darker one.

One of them is drawing gas off the other one, creating a 250,000 °C hot spot at the point of impact. This means that only one of the stars will be a white dwarf because a white dwarf has no gas to lose. It's gas is mostly helium, meaning that its hydrogen has already been stripped by the white dwarf.

Joe
www.govertschilling.nl/nieuws/archief/2002/0203/020315_eso.htm
The reason you missed the distance to J0806 is that everybody is so busy talking about its short year that they've forgotten to mention how far away it is. This article puts in in the Crab Nebula, and that object is 6,300 light-years away. This distance may explain why astronomers are having a hard time seeing it. That and it's being a 21 magnitude star ( www.astronewsnetwork.com/News%20For%20March%202002.html ).

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2003ApJ...598..492I&db_key=AST
This article assumes its distance to be 500 parsecs, which is 1,600 light-years. That's quite a spread from 6,300.

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2003ApJ...598..492I&db_key=AST
This PDF seems to say that the binary is 1,000 parsecs away, or 3,300 light-years.

There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how far away J0806 is. I'll go out on a limb and say it's further than I'd like to walk.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Dave,

That is one good researching effort!...

Even on the disagreements of the distances, it's still quite cool on the overall scale of things.

[Maddad]

You disagree on the distance? *Handing you a pair of sneakers*

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Me...naw there's only so much I can do with the 4.5". But, the links tell of various distances.

Astronomy is mostly guesswork at this stage of exploration anyway...give or take a parsec here and there won't keep me up at night.