They say amateur astronomers may be able to even see the pair as one spot on the sky, flashing every seven minutes, with the help of a telescope at least one metre in size. ZTF lets us do this because its camera is huge, and it can easily take pictures across the sky and then come back and repeat.”īurdge and colleagues expect ZTF J1539+5027 to keep blinking for a hundred thousand years to come.
“People haven’t been able to systematically search for things that change on minute-time scales before. “This pair really stuck out because the signal repeats so often and in such a predictable way,” he says. Once he found candidate objects, he used the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Kitt Peak National Observatory to follow up and find the most promising candidates. As per usual, Warhammer content is thin on the ground. The September one arrived quite late last month, so I am glad that this issue has been promptly delivered on the 29th. Burdge found ZTF J1539+5027 by running a computer program that tracked 10 million cosmic objects, looking for changes over a three-month span. Glee And not the crappy Network Ten show either The new issue of White Dwarf came in the mail today, which I am happy about. ZTF scans the entire sky every three nights and the bulk of the plane of the Milky Way every night. “We’ve seen many examples of a type of system where one white dwarf has been mostly cannibalised by its companion, but we rarely catch these systems as they are still merging like this one.” “Matter is getting ready to spill off of the bigger and lighter white dwarf onto the smaller and heavier one, which will eventually completely subsume its lighter companion. “As the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter one, it blocks most of the light, resulting in the seven-minute blinking pattern we see in the ZTF data,” says lead author Kevin Burdge. Every month, White Dwarf magazine prints letters from readers, and this is where you send them Give the White Dwarf team your thoughts, questions. And they move at hundreds of kilometres per second. The eclipsing nature of the stellar companions is key, the astronomers say, because it lets them determine the stars’ sizes, masses and orbital periods.Įach is roughly the size of Earth, and together they weigh as much as the Sun, but they orbit very close to each other – at one-fifth the distance between Earth and the Moon.
One second represents two minutes of real time. An artist’s animation of “eclipsing binary” ZTF J1530+5027.