Remarkably, because they whirl around so close to each other, the white dwarfs stir the space-time continuum, creating expanding ripples known as gravitational waves. Those waves carry away orbital energy, causing the stars to spiral closer together. Half of the systems are expected to merge eventually. The tightest binary, orbiting once every hour, will merge in about 100 million years.
"We have tripled the number of known, merging white-dwarf systems," said Smithsonian astronomer and co-author Mukremin Kilic. "Now, we can begin to understand how these systems form and what they may become in the near future."
When two white dwarfs merge, their combined mass can exceed a tipping point, causing them to detonate and explode as a Type Ia supernova. Brown and his colleagues suggest that the merging binaries they have discovered might be one source of underluminous supernovae -- a rare type of supernova explosion 100 times fainter than a normal Type Ia supernova, which ejects only one-fifth as much matter.
"The rate at which our white dwarfs are merging is the same as the rate of underluminous supernovae - about one every 2,000 years," explained Brown. "While we can't know for sure whether our merging white dwarfs will explode as underluminous supernovae, the fact that the rates are the same is highly suggestive."
The binary star system J0923+3028 consists of two white dwarfs that are gradually spiraling in toward each other. In about 100 million years they will merge. Since their combined mass is too low to result in a supernova (i.e. less than the Chandrasekhar limit), a single, more massive white dwarf will be left after the merger. Nuclear fusion of a shell of material on the surface will result in a flash of light like a supernova but fainter.
(Photo Credit: Clayton Ellis (CfA))
The binary star system J0923+3028 consists of two white dwarfs: a visible star weighing 23 percent as much as our Sun and about four times the diameter of Earth, and an unseen companion weighing 44 percent of the Sun and about one Earth-diameter in size. The stars are currently separated by about 220,000 miles and orbit each other once per hour. The stars will spiral in toward each other and merge in about 100 million years.
(Photo Credit: Clayton Ellis (CfA))