PResearchers from Northwestern University and the University of California at San Diego, USA, have discovered an extreme binary system that features two dwarf stars that are so cold that they emit no visible light. The set is called LP 413-53AB.
According to astronomers, the two stars are so close that they take less than an Earth day to orbit each other and are also in an “ultracold” class, which emit mostly infrared light, making them invisible to human eyes.
Fortunately, however, they do not escape telescopes. The researchers discovered LP 413-53AB while combing through archived data. Dwarf stars have little mass and orbit each other in just 20.5 hours.
the astronomers decided to observe the system directly using the WM Keck observatory in Hawaii. The team’s first observation lasted just two hours in March 2022, before following up in July, October and December.
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12 Jan
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“When we were making this measurement, we could see things changing within a few minutes of observation,” Adam Burgasser, professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego and collaborator on this research, said in the statement.
Scholars claim that the distance between the two stars is about 1% of the space between the Earth and the Sun, and they speculate that they may have migrated towards each other over their lifetimes. LP 413-53AB is also estimated to be billions of years old and has one of the shortest orbital periods ever detected for a binary star system.
