Search Here

A newly discovered system that consists of two white dwarf stars and a highly dense pulsar-all is attracting astronomers to probe a range of cosmic mysteries that includes the nature of gravity too. The system is all packed within a space that is even smaller than the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

The pulsar was originally discovered by an American graduate who used the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope. It is 4,200 light-years away from the Earth and is spinning 366 times per second.

For scientists, the three-body systems is the best opportunity yet to discover any possible violation of a key concept in Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.

“By doing very high-precision timing of the pulses coming from the pulsar, we can test for such a deviation from the strong equivalence principle at a sensitivity several orders of magnitude greater than ever before available,” said UBC astronomer Ingrid Stairs in the press release. “Finding a deviation from the strong equivalence principle would indicate a breakdown of General Relativity and would point us toward a new, revised theory of gravity.”

“This is the first millisecond pulsar found in such a system, and we immediately recognized that it provides us a tremendous opportunity to study the effects and nature of gravity,” added Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), who also led the study in the press release. “This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions.”

The developments of the study is published in the journal Nature.