GARCHING, Germany, Feb. 11 (UPI) — A new report by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory suggests two newly discovered white dwarfs are destined for a violent collision. And when they finally crash, the result will be a Type Ia supernova.
White dwarfs are dead stars that are slowly cooling, growing denser and denser as they shrink and dim. In this instance, there are two white dwarfs — and they’re caught in a death spiral of sorts, orbiting each other once every four hours.
The two circling white dwarfs of interest are partially hidden by swaths of gas and star dust called a planetary nebula — the materials shed from the outer layers of the decaying dwarfs, no longer to generate the temperature necessary to enable stellar fusion.
Astronomers at the ESO originally looked into the interior of this star system to understand why late stage stars produce oddly shaped nebulas. But scientists quickly became intrigued by the nature of their double star system — two white dwarfs, extremely close together.
Their calculations suggests the spiraling stars will fuse (explosively) into a single sphere in roughly 700 million years — the inevitable outcome of stars with masses seven-times that of the sun, squeezed into orbs the size of the Earth.
“Until now, the formation of supernovae Type Ia by the merging of two white dwarfs was purely theoretical,” David Jones, co-author of a new paper on the white dwarfs, {link:explained in a press release: “http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1505/”,nw}. “The pair of stars in Henize 2-428 is the real thing!”
The details of the duo’s impending explosion were published {link:in the journal Nature: “http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14124.html”,nw}.
“It’s an extremely enigmatic system,” concluded lead author Miguel Santander-García. “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.”
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