Astronomers have used the fastest eclipsing binary system to discover two dead stars. The discovery was called the ZTF J1539+5027. The researchers used a whole sky survey designed to locate objects that rapidly change in brightness to find the stars. Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) was the location where they spotted the dead stars from 8,000 light-years away.

 

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The two stars are supposedly very close to each other and meet up in a spooning fashion. They had just about 49,700 miles between them and travelled at hundreds of kilometres per second. Astronomers call this system an eclipsing binary.

 

 

They discovered that one of the stars is a little bigger than the other. The lead author of the study, Kevin Burdge, says:

“As the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter one, it blocks most of the light, resulting in the seven-minute blinking pattern we see in the ZTF data. We rarely catch these systems as they are still merging like this one.”

 

Gravitational waves

According to Burdge, one of the stars may have grown very hot from feeding off the other one. This is a rare and important discovery for astronomers. They had only just found out that the system emits gravitational waves.

 

The stars would be described as dwarf-like because they are the size of the earth. It is also believed that these stars are very dense and their movement through space causes invisible waves to travel through the cosmos.

 

 

Lead astronomer Burdge also noted that Earth is too noisy to see the signal generated by the stars. Apparently, the stars are predicted to keep spinning around one another for the next 100,000 years. This will give astronomers the chance to detect the gravitation waves of the stars in the next 15 years.

 

The overall intent of the project, according to Burdge, is to identify as many Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) sources as possible. The European Space Agency’s LISA is expected to come online in 2034. It will hunt for faint gravitational waves from space.