NASA's Kepler space telescope uncovered evidence which proves that dead stars bend the light of their companion red Star, according to a report in Science Daily.
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in binary, or double, star systems predicted what NASA's Kepler space telescope has just uncovered. The space agency's telescope has just uncovered evidence, which proves that dead stars bend the light of their companion red Star.
A dead star, also known as a white dwarf is actually the burnt core of something that used to be a star like the Sun. Its orbit is still locked with a small "red dwarf" star. Physically it is smaller than its companion red star but is more massive. It has been discovered that when this dead star comes in front of the red star, its gravity causes the light of the red star to bend and brighten, says the report.
"This white dwarf is about the size of Earth but the mass of the sun," said Phil Muirhead, Ph.D. of the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the study. "It's so hefty that the red dwarf, though larger in physical size, is circling around the white dwarf."
The red star that was observed was found to orbit its dead star in just 1.4 days. This period is so short that astronomers stated that the star must have "previously undergone a common-envelope phase in which the red dwarf orbited within the outer layers of the star that formed the white dwarf," Graduate student and co-author of the study, Jim Fuller explained.
For this new study, scientists used gravitational lensing to establish the mass of the white dwarf. By combining this information with all the data they acquired, they were able to accurately measure the mass of the red dwarf and the physical sizes of both stars.
The findings of the study will be published April 20 in the Astrophysical Journal, "Characterizing the cool KOIs: A mutually eclipsing post-common envelope binary."
