Miguel Santander-García with the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional in Alcalá de Henares, Spain and colleagues at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid and the ESO have discovered the most massive pair of white dwarf stars ever seen. The discovery was reported in the edition of the journal Nature. The stars were found in the planetary nebula Henize 2-428 in the constellation Aquila about 17 light-years from Earth.
The astronomers were looking for something else when they spied this pair of stars. The original research aimed to explain why some stars assume odd shapes as they near the end of their lives. The two stars were a surprise that proved what the scientists were originally looking for.
The pair of stars is so close to each other that they are expected to merge into a huge galactic thermonuclear explosion in 700,000,000 years. Each star weighs 80 times as much as the Earth’s sun. The pair is the most massive white dwarf stars ever seen by man although the ancient Greeks were familiar with the constellation and the stars but did not know the true nature of the bright objects in Aquila.
The lopsided glowing cloud was found to actually be two stars that had been deformed from an oval shape by the force of gravity. The gravity increases as the two stars get closer to each other producing more deformation and the appearance of being a single star. The discovery confirms the theory that gravitation can cause stars to collide and subsequently produce a supernova. NASA’s Pioneer 11 space probe is expected to reach Aquila in about four million years and may catch a glimpse of the merging stars.
