Astronomers have discovered a system of two stars that orbit each other. Their feature
What is known
Astronomers have discovered two supercold dwarfs.Their temperature is less than 2430 degrees Celsius (4400 Fahrenheit). For comparison, the approximate temperature of the Sun's crust is 1.5 million degrees Celsius (2.7 million Fahrenheit). We cannot see them because most of the light is emitted in the infrared.
The star system is called LP 413-53AB.Scientists have known about it for a long time, but only believed that it consists of one star. It was possible to see the second dwarf thanks to astrophysicist Chih-Chun Hsu, who created his own algorithm for modeling stars based on their spectral data. He learned that the spectral lines move in opposite directions and split into pairs.
The astrophysicist suggested that the system containstwo stars that are very close to each other. To test the hypothesis, he used the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Ji-Chun Hsu and his team observed the star system from March 2022 to January 2023.
As it turned out, the distance between the starsis approximately 1.5 million km. This is only 1% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. In addition, the stars have the lowest orbits among all such systems, and the time of revolution around each other is only 17 hours. According to Zhi-Chun Hsu, usually in such systems the period of revolution reaches several years.
Another record of the discovered pair is its age.There are most dwarfs 40 million years old, then our heroes exist for about 4-5 billion years. This means that their age is comparable to the age of the Sun. And a two-star system was formed, probably as a result of the merger of three bodies, during which one of them was ejected, and the other two approached.
Discovery by astrophysicist Zhi-Chun Hsu and his teamwill allow scientists to find even more such systems, which have so far managed to successfully hide not only from the human eye, but also from the lenses of telescopes.