Exotic pair may allow scientists to "probe for extreme gravity."
Two orbiting white dwarfs radiate gravitational waves, as seen in an artist's conception.
A pair of aging stars discovered 3,000 light-years away is locked in a "dance" of death—a union that will end in their collision and a possible supernova, astronomers say.
The binary star system consists of two white dwarfs—the burnt-out cores of sunlike stars. The white dwarfs are gradually spiraling toward each other at breakneck speeds of 370 miles (595 kilometers) a second, and they're destined to merge in 900,000 years.
But astronomers hope that, before the collision, the spinning stars will help scientists test Einstein's general theory of relativity and even reveal the origins of an entire class of supernovae. (Related: "Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale.")
"What is so incredible is that this exotic pair of Earth- and Neptune-sized stars are orbiting each other at only a third of our Earth-moon distance, circling each other every 12 minutes," said study leader Warren Brown, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"And because there is no interaction—or star matter streaming between them—we may have a unique stellar laboratory here to look for effects of general relativity and probe for extreme gravity."
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