The binary star system includes white dwarf star that makes electrons move at a speed of light resulting into massive amount of energy being reflected upon its companion red dwarf star. Through the device, they were able to witness the powerful radiation, which caused the star to pulse across an entire electromagnetic spectrum.
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The white dwarf’s observations were carried out on the William Herschel and Issac Newton Telescopes located on the Spanish island of La Palma, Canaries, the European Southern Observatory’s Large Telescope in Chile, Australia Telescope Compact Array, Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Swift Satellite.
Astronomers studying a weird binary star system that pulses brightly every 2 minutes across nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum can’t figure it out: Either one star is lashing the other with a particle beam, or their embrace is so close that one is making the other shine.
Comprised of a tiny white dwarf and red dwarf that orbit one another every 3.6 hours, the AR Scorpii system was misidentified in the 1970s as a single variable star that fluctuated in brightness. Follow-up studies by researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom then characterized the distant star system, making use of multiple telescopes, including the VLT, and NASA’s Swift and Hubble Space Telescope installations. This study was published July 28 in Nature. Scientists suggest the white dwarf and its super fast spin rate are likely responsible for the magnetic field, but they aren’t sure where the electrons themselves are coming from – the red dwarf or the white dwarf.
Highly magnetic and spinning on a period just shy of two minutes, AR Sco produces lighthouse-like beams of radiation and particles, which lash across the face of the cool star, a red dwarf, and across our line-of-sight causing the entire system to brighten and fade dramatically twice every two minutes.
The pulses are so strong that radio signals are emitted, an aspect that has never been seen before in a white dwarf system. “We realised we were seeing something extraordinary within minutes of starting the observations”. They are also mysterious. Although first spotted more than 40 years ago, its unusual broadband pulsing-from x-ray to radio waves-was only noticed last year by a group of amateur astronomers.
The binary system was discovered by a group of amateur astronomers from Germany, Belgium and Britain.
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A co-author of the study also from the University of Warwick, Boris Gänsicke says in a press release: “We’ve known pulsing neutron stars for almost fifty years, and some theories predicted white dwarfs could show similar behaviour”.
