A very rare discovery: Failed star orbits a dead star every 71 minutes

[Judi Lynn]

June 9, 2017


An international team of astronomers using data from the rejuvenated Kepler space telescope have discovered a rare gem: A binary system consisting of a failed star, also known as a brown dwarf, and the remnant of a dead star known as a white dwarf. And one of the properties that makes this binary so remarkable is that the orbital period of the two objects is only 71.2 minutes. This means that the speeds of the stars as they orbit each other are about 100 km/sec (a speed that would allow you to travel across the Atlantic in less than a minute). Using five different ground-based telescopes across three continents, the team was able to deduce that this binary system consists of a failed star with a mass of about 6.7% that of the Sun (equivalent to 67 Jupiter masses) and a white dwarf that has a mass of about 40% of the sun's mass. They have also determined that the white dwarf will begin cannibalizing the brown dwarf in less than 250 million years making this binary the shortest-period pre-cataclysmic variable ever to have been discovered.


The hot white dwarf star had originally been identified by SDSS as WD1202-024 and was thought to be an isolated star. The fact that it is actually a member of a very close 71-minute binary was announced by Dr. Lorne Nelson of Bishop's University at the semi-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, TX on June 6th (see the link on the right for a concatenated version of the webcast of the press conference). Dr. Saul Rappaport (M.I.T.) and Andrew Vanderburg (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) were analyzing the light-curves of more than 28,000 K2 targets when one observation caught their attention. Unlike the transits of exoplanets that pass in front of their host stars and cause a small attenuation in the brightness of the star, this light curve showed reasonably deep and broad eclipses with a sinusoidal contribution to the brightness between eclipses that is thought to be due to an illumination of the cool component by the much hotter white dwarf.

The team quickly devised a model for the binary showing that it was consistent with a hot white dwarf composed of helium being eclipsed by a much cooler and lower-mass brown dwarf companion that is seen nearly edge-on.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-rare-discovery-star-orbits-dead.html#jCp

[judesedit]

1. Who cares. Feed the hungry children in this world first

Get your priorities straight

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. Have you ever thought that maybe the science of this work

might someday translate into feeding hungry children.
Is it all science you hate or just astronomy?

[judesedit]

3. I happen to love both. Problem is we have hungry children now. Someday doesn't

put food in their stomachs today. I say "Get your priorities straight"

[defacto7]

5. Priority has nothing to do with exclusion.

No one is less interested in feeding hungry children because of interest in science. Priority in your context is a logical fallacy.

[judesedit]

9. All of the billions spent on these and other programs

Is actually not spent on these programs. Look at NASA and the condition of the shuttle. Much of the money goes into the pockets of the already wealthy corporatists. We don't even know what's below the oceans on our own planet. And the greed is the main reason we have starving children at all. Humans are inquisitive creatures. That is fine. Take care of the life threatening stuff first. Like giving people clean water, air, food, healthcare, a roof over their heads and an education if they want one. More people would support the programs. And we wouldn't have to import good scientists...we'd have plenty here. Don't take that as anti-immigrant. Immigrants built this country. I'm more wary of rwnjs than any immigrant. Imho

[defacto7]

15. Point taken...

Your argument is honorable. I personally don't think exclusion of research or delaying advancement in human knowledge until poverty is conquered will improve the plight of humankind. I think it would have the opposite effect. If the priority is ending poverty, the path to that end is much more complicated than money. We have to change base human instincts bred into us from millions of years of tribe survival thinking. We have to remove war/greed thinking from science, replace survival thinking based on the individual with survival of the human race and the planet. We have to change the politics of money and greed with the politics of humanity.
And how is that accomplished? Education, instill wonder, exercise life and the expansion of human possibities, dwell on going beyond the worst of our nature and embrace the future. If we don't change our thinking, our politics, our relationship to the planet we will never end poverty.
Money fixes nothing, it exaserbates the problem. But if that is the only physical means available, we have to use it to break the 'cause' of poverty or poverty itself remains self perpetuating.
If I were to choose the top priority it would be education in its broadest sense.

[FiveGoodMen]

4. I agree with your priorities, but ...

This is the science group.

And the OP is the kind of thing you should expect to find here.

[NNadir]

6. I would suggest that it is you who needs to get your priorities straight.

You seem to think that fetishized "hungry children" will be fed if we defund science.

That's nonsense. One may legitimately argue about how many people this planet can support, and the resultant ecological risks associated with high technology, but...

The fact is that there is no way in hell that this planet could support the 7 billion people now on it without high technology, and frankly, high technology requires that some people have a love for science, a love inspired by understanding the farthest reaches of the universe.

Trust me, without science, the number of starving children in the world would grow exponentially.

I note, with some disgust, that you would not have the privilege of expressing your contempt for scientific inquiry on the internet were it not for the "space race" of the 1960's, investment in which did a lot to drive computer technology, in particular, small localized small computers, like those that fit into the Apollo spacecraft, also decried at the time as a waste of money that could go to starving children.

Never the less, in percentage terms, fewer people are starving today than were starving in the 1960's.

If you hate astronomers because according to you they are taking money out of the mouths of crying starving babies in your imagination, not mine, I would suggest that you sell your computer and everything else you own and donate the money to Unicef.

I hope for a world where all children will have the opportunity to see these great things, but the world will not be served by bashing science funding.

Bashing science and its funding is popular with a certain orange traitor who occupies a house once occupied by men like Lincoln and Adams and two Roosevelts, and is so defiling their legacy, but really, in my opinion, it has no place here, especially not in the science forum.

[judesedit]

11. Hey I'm even for GMOs in areas that can't grow food otherwise...we're talking about finding

other planets etc. Don't you think we should be taking care of this one first?

[NNadir]

13. I am very much in favor of taking care of this planet, but you clearly have a primitive view of...

...how science works.

For starters, the instrumentation utilized to detect planets in other systems relies on the knowledge of engineers who may find other applications in fields that have nothing to do with planetary or interstellar science.

In fact, this kind of equipment is actually key to saving this planet.

Look, if you hate science, science funding, and scientists, that's your privilege, just as it is the privilege of the orange Idi Amin wannabe living in the White House.

But don't couch it in a faux concern for starving children. You clearly have a very primitive understanding of agriculture and the science on which it depends.

Here is just one example, among tens of thousands of examples of how space based science is helping to feed the world:

International Journal of Remote Sensing, 21:18, 3487-3508 "Estimating crop yields and production by integrating the FAO Crop Specific Water Balance model with real-time satellite data and ground-based ancillary data"

The imaging technology that made this satellite based study of crop yields in Kenya in the period from 1988-2000.

If people bought into the "save starving children" anti-science rhetoric observed here and now - and I've been confronting this trash thinking for my entire adult life - this study would not have happened.

Here's a link to a more recent paper on satellite based study of droughts in India:

A combined deficit index for regional agricultural drought assessment over semi-arid tract of India using geostationary meteorological satellite data

(International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation Volume 39, July 2015, Pages 28–39)

The type of imaging utilized here is not appreciably different than the type of imaging utilized in interstellar planet searches. Interstellar planet searching not only enriches humanity aesthetically and, I think, morally and spiritually, it also has practical results in improving human lives.

Trust me, we saved a lot of lives in the last half a century that would have been lost if the type of thinking you express here had been adopted as policy.

We have enough trouble in the scientific world with the moron in the White House. We don't need faux moral lectures about "starving children" to make things even worse.

I'd suggest you rethink your rhetoric.

[judesedit]

12. Hey I'm even for GMOs in areas that can't grow food otherwise...we're talking about finding

other planets etc. Don't you think we should be taking care of this one first?

[Eko]

7. That is a bit of a short sided view.

Maybe understanding how we have as much food as we do would help with some perspective.

"Fritz Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilizers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

Science does indeed feed quite a few of us. Who knows what wondrous scientific advances that will further humanity will come from such research as in this article.

[Kaleva]

8. Without science, far more children would die.

Many wouldn't make it to adulthood because of childhood diseases.

[judesedit]

10. We're talking about finding dead stars orbiting other dead stars not medical research

[Kaleva]

14. Medical research has benefited from space exploration