Two stars orbiting each other at very high speeds provide scientists with a practical look at what Albert Einstein was talking about - the curvature of spacetime. That is, of course, it is impossible to see this curvature itself, but one can observe the very gravitational funnel that accompanies this curvature.
Scientists say that the two stars in question belong to a class of so-called "white dwarfs" - very dense, hot and bright types of stars. Two white dwarfs in a binary system make a complete revolution around each other in just 13 minutes of Earth time. Both white dwarfs are, technically speaking, stellar cores that have collapsed under the influence of their own gravity. In the new system, two stars are located three times closer to each other than the Earth is to the Sun.
The researchers say that in the system under consideration, they first recorded the optical bending of light caused by a gravitational funnel. The funnel itself is a product of the giant gravitational field produced by each of the stars. "This observation is perhaps the clearest and clearest evidence of the effect of gravitational waves," says astronomer Warren Brown of the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States.
Gravitational waves and gravitational funnels have been described in general relativity. According to her, they bend the plane of space-time and cause the effect when the shortest point between two objects is not a straight line, but a curve. Such an exotic effect is generated by very high gravity from both stars, attracted to each other. Also, gravitational funnels (and much deeper) should be observed in black holes, but due to even more powerful gravity, black holes completely suck in visible radiation and it is impossible to fix funnels from the external system.
In the case of new stars, the gravity turned out to be large enough to create a funnel, but not large enough to "swallow" all the light falling on its borders.
The new system was named SDSS J065133.338 + 284423.37. The stars in it are located so close that at first astronomers mistook them for one star. Brown says that just over a year ago, another team of astronomers also found an extreme binary system, but in it the stars made a complete revolution around each other in 19 minutes, but now this process in the new system takes 6 minutes less, which indicates a smaller distance between stars.
Brown says that in a few years, science should have a laser interferometer LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), which will allow a clearer study of the gravitational funnel. The specialists will have enough time for this, since according to the calculations of astronomers, the stars in this system will collide with each other only after 2 million years.