Record breakers! Super-close dwarf stars orbit each other in less than a day
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Loading... - Elijah Hughes
- 02 Mar 2023
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The cool stars are separated by just around 1.5 million miles, 1% the distance between Earth and the sun.
Scientists have discovered a record-breaking binary star system consisting of two ultracool dwarf stars so close to each other that they complete an orbit in under a day.
The stars are separated by just around 1.5 million miles, about 1% the distance between the Earth and the sun, which means a year for these stars lasts just 17 hours. This makes the star system the tightest ultracool dwarf binary ever found.
The binary system, designated LP 413–53AB and located in the constellation of Taurus, was discovered by Northwestern University and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) astrophysicists using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the slopes of the dormant Maunakea volcano in Hawaiʻi.
"It's exciting to discover such an extreme system," Chih-Chun "Dino" Hsu, the leader of the team and a Northwestern University astrophysicist said in a statement.(opens in new tab) "In principle, we knew these systems should exist, but no such systems had been identified yet."
Ultracool dwarfs are one of the most common star types in the universe, but these low-mass stars are so cool that most of the light they emit is in the form of an infrared glow. This means they are invisible to the human eye and tough to detect. Short-period binaries of these stars are even rarer. Read More…
