Space-time is swirling around a dead star, proving Einstein right again, a new study finds. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time.
are the superdense Earth-size cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our sun will end up as a white dwarf one day, as will more than 90% of all stars in our galaxy.
The researchers measured when pulses from the pulsar arrived at Earth to an accuracy within 100 microseconds over a period of nearly 20 years, using the Parkes and UTMOST radio telescopes in Australia. This allowed them to detect a long-term drift in the way the pulsar and white dwarf orbit each other.
Previous research suggested that the white dwarf formed before the pulsar in this binary system. One prediction of such theoretical models is that, before the pulsar-forming supernova occurred, the progenitor of the pulsar shed nearly 20,000 Earth masses' worth of matter onto the white dwarf over the course of about 16,000 years, boosting its rate of spin.
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