A team of astrophysicists has discovered a binary pair of ultra-cool dwarfs so close together that they look like a single star.
They're remarkable because they only take 20.5 hours to orbit each other, meaning their year is less than one Earth day. They're also much older than similar systems.
A team of astronomers presented their findings at the 241st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Chih-Chun"Dino" Hsu, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, led the research. The system is named LP 413-53AB.Chih-Chun"Dino" Hsu, a Northwestern astrophysicist who led the study."In principle, we knew these systems should exist, but no such systems had been identified yet.
But in those earlier images, the stars just happened to be aligned, so they appeared as a single star. The chances of that happening are high for a tight binary pair like this. To emphasize just how close the stars are to each other, Hsu compared them to our own Solar System and another well-known system.and one of its Galilean moons, Callisto. It's also closer than the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is to its closest planet, TRAPPIST-1b.
"This is remarkable because when they were young, something like 1 million years old, these stars would have been on top of each other,"Or the stars may have begun as a pair on wider orbits and then become closer over time.
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