'Impossible' Stars Found in Super-Close Orbital Dances

[Taylirious]

http://news.yahoo.com/impossible-stars-found-super-close-orbital-dances-122640670.html

Four pairs of what astronomers are calling "impossible stars" — stellar twins in orbits so close they defy explanation — have been found in our Milky Way galaxy, scientists say.

Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii discovered the four star pairs, each of which is a binary system in which two stars circle each other in less than four hours. Until now, scientists thought that such twin-star setups couldn't exist.

Our sun does not orbit another star, but roughly half of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy do, as part of a binary system. These binary stars likely formed close together, and have been orbiting one another since their birth, the researchers said.

It was typically thought that if a star formed too close to another, the two stars would quickly merge into a single, bigger star. This theory seemed to agree with observations taken over the last three decades, which reveal that binary systems are abundant, but none of the pairs have an orbital period shorter than five hours, the researchers said.

Maybe people who know more about this can break it down for me. This seems interesting cause "stellar twins in orbits so close they defy explanation"

 

[gturner]

This doesn't sound implausible, and I'm sure some quick computer simulations could explore the dynamics (tidal effects, etc). There's also of course the fact that "should merge" doesn't mean "should have already merged", so maybe that will happen in their future. And finally, a denser than normal star should be able to hold itself together better than most, and perhaps the calculations were only done for main-sequence stars of common types.

In astronomy, in virtually all cases, if observations don't match the expectations, the expectations were wrong.

 

[publiusr]

I wonder if this started as a three body system--with the two stars in a binary being closer after a brown dwarf was slung away.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

In astronomy, in virtually all cases, if observations don't match the expectations, the expectations were wrong.

Curiously, this doesn't seem to be the case for Dark Matter/Dark Energy, where scientists continue to search for an explanation -- ANY explanation -- that wouldn't require them to modify their original expectations.

 

[MacLeod]

All it could prove is that the universe has wonders that we can't imagine.

 

[STR]

In astronomy, in virtually all cases, if observations don't match the expectations, the expectations were wrong.

Curiously, this doesn't seem to be the case for Dark Matter/Dark Energy, where scientists continue to search for an explanation -- ANY explanation -- that wouldn't require them to modify their original expectations.

Dark matter and energy came out of the false expectation that what we can see with telescopes was all that was out there. While dark energy remains a mystery, dark matter is slowly, but steadily getting nailed down.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

In astronomy, in virtually all cases, if observations don't match the expectations, the expectations were wrong.

Curiously, this doesn't seem to be the case for Dark Matter/Dark Energy, where scientists continue to search for an explanation -- ANY explanation -- that wouldn't require them to modify their original expectations.

Dark matter and energy came out of the false expectation that what we can see with telescopes was all that was out there.

Half right. Dark matter came out of the expectation that what we could see with telescopes ought to be consistent with the predictions of standard model (Big Bang) cosmology. Repeated contradictions of those observations forced the postulation of Dark Matter and dark energy as explanatory entities. This is, so far, the only scientific field that has resorted to inventing an invisible/undetectable/unquantifiable substance pervading the universe in order to explain why the theory doesn't seem to work, instead of modifying the theory to make it consistent with the evidence.