Astronomers Spot Two White Dwarfs Doomed to Die in a Quadruple Detonation

Astronomers have spotted two hefty white dwarf stars—highly compact stellar embers—orbiting close together that appear destined to die in an extraordinarily violent quadruple detonation.

- Reuters

WASHINGTON:

The two stars, gravitationally bound to each other in what is called a binary system, are located in our Milky Way galaxy about 160 light-years from Earth—relatively close in cosmic terms. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km.

White dwarfs are among the most compact celestial objects. Stars with up to eight times the mass of our Sun appear destined to end up this way. They eventually burn up all the hydrogen they use as fuel. Gravity then causes them to collapse and blow off their outer layers in a "red giant" stage, eventually leaving behind a compact core roughly the diameter of Earth—the white dwarf.

"White dwarfs are the stellar remnants of the vast majority of stars, and from time to time we find systems where two white dwarfs closely orbit each other," said James Munday, lead author of the study.

The researchers used data from four ground-based telescopes to study this binary system. One of the white dwarfs has a mass about 83% that of our Sun and the other about 72%. No other known white dwarf binary has a larger combined mass, Munday said.