It seems appropriate that research started at one university and finished at another describes the rare interactions of twin stars.
A graduate student, tantalized by mysterious radio pulses from the Milky Way, set her sights — and several telescopes — on finding the source of the strange signals. The bursts of sound were especially unusual because they would last from tens of minutes to hours. Radio pulsars, by comparison, produce much shorter signals — often mere seconds.
Multiple kinds of observations from a variety of instruments led groups to a rare phenomenon: a white dwarf tightly orbiting a red dwarf every 125 minutes. The stellar dancing duet can be located in the star system in the direction of the Great Bear, otherwise known as Ursa Major, according to two papers published in Nature Astronomy.
Read More: Stars Are Born and Die Every Day — Here’s How They Evolve in Space
Teaming Up-Twice
Just as a shared center of gravity ties the two stars together, a young scientist acted as the glue for two research groups that characterized the phenomenon. When Iris de Ruiter was finishing up her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam, she developed a technique to search for radio pulses of varying length. She applied that technique to archived data from the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope in the Netherlands.
While tweaking her technique, she discovered a strange pulse from 2015. She looked through more data and found more similar pulses — all from the same source.
After she moved to the University of Sydney, she joined a group that performed follow-up observations of the target LOFAR had identified. They employed two telescopes: the 6.5 m diameter Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas and determined that the signal wasn’t coming from one flashing star but from a pair.
Teamwork, in this case, really did make an astronomical dream work. Starting the project at one university and finishing it at another provided an unexpected advantage for de Ruiter.
“We worked with experts from all kinds of astronomical disciplines,” de Ruiter said in a press release. “With different techniques and observations, we got a little closer to the solution step by step.”
Sound Mystery
The scientists still don’t know exactly why or how the pair of stars produce such long radio pulses. They have two theories: they could either emanate from the strong magnetic field of the white dwarf or be generated by the interaction of the magnetic fields of the two stars.
Between the two groups’ initial findings, others have identified similar radio-emitting systems. But those findings have yet to be linked to a white dwarf, a neutron star, or another source.
Read More: ‘Poster Child’ Brown Dwarf Is Actually Twins Orbiting Each Other
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Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
