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BINARY STARS

The plunging pirouette of two low-mass stars

Astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility have discovered two white dwarfs orbiting each other every 6.9 minutes. But there is nothing transient about the gravitational waves emitted from this binary: the stars will produce persistent ripples in spacetime for millennia.

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Fig. 1: An ultracompact pair of detached white dwarfs.

images in a, NASA/Dana Berry, Sky Works Digital.

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Correspondence to J. J. Hermes.

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Hermes, J.J. The plunging pirouette of two low-mass stars. Nat Astron 3, 690–691 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0863-3

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