Posted on 03/14/2010 5:20:16 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Two extremely dense stars in an intimate dance are spinning around each other in just 5.4 minutes -- making them the fastest known stellar partners in the galaxy, astronomers have confirmed. To have such a speedy orbit, the stars must be moving at about 310 miles (500 kilometers) a second, the team calculates. The whirling duo, known as HM Cancri, also has the tightest orbit of any known "binary" star system. Both stars are white dwarfs... The stellar corpses are separated by no more than three times the width of Earth. In such tight quarters, hot gases flow between the two stars, releasing huge amounts of energy... Study leader Gijs Roelofs, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was part of the team that first detected periodic x-ray emissions from HM Cancri in 1999... To confirm the stars' dizzying tango, Roelofs and colleagues turned to the world's second largest optical telescope, at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, where they measured "wobbles" in the system's brightness... HM Cancri's record-breaking orbit couldn't get much quicker, Steeghs added, since the stars would merge if they got any closer, triggering a massive explosion known as a type Ia supernova.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
My pleasure. There’s some interesting stuff out there named Cancri.
Cosmic star love. (sigh)
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