This Stellar Pair is Doomed to a Thermonuclear Disaster

Two stars are headed toward disaster. Astronomers have discovered a close pair of white dwarf stars that are doomed to merge and cause a thermonuclear explosion that will result in a supernova.

The pair of stars are tiny, extremely dense stellar remnants that have a total mass about 1.8 times that of the sun. The researchers first found the pair after trying to find out how some stars produce strangely shaped and asymmetrical nebulae late in their lives.

"When we looked at this object's central star with ESO's Very Large Telescope, we found not just one but a pair of stars at the heart of this strangely lopsided glowing cloud," said Henri Boffin, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The fact that there were two stars supports the idea that double central stars may explain the odd shapes of some of these nebulae. More interesting, though, is the fact that the stars each have a mass slightly less than the sun and orbit each other every four hours. This means that they are sufficiently close to one another that they will grow closer and closer, spiraling in due to the emission of gravitational waves, before eventually merging into a single star within the next 700 million years.

"It's an extremely enigmatic system," said Miguel Santander-Garcia, one of the researchers. "It will have important repercussions for the study of supernovae Type Ia, which are widely used to measure astronomical distances and were key to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to dark energy."

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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