There's widespread panic in the streets and overwhelming apathy indoors...
The sky is falling in!
Two stars poised to merge
Two dense stars whipping around each other at breakneck speed may be the strongest known source of Einstein's space-trembling gravity waves.
The double star - called RX J0806 - was discovered in 1994 in X-rays. Later shown to be blinking on and off every 5.4 minutes, the two-star setup is believed to be a pair of white dwarfs - the dense ashes of burnt-out stars - rotating around each other. Strohmayer, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, presented data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory that shows the time between the X-ray blips is decreasing by 1.2 milliseconds every year. The implication is that the dwarfs are orbiting faster and faster, as they gradually fall into each other at a rate of one inch per hour.
Strohmayer said the two dwarfs should continue losing energy to gravity waves and merge between 500,000 and one million years from now.
Watch out. The stars are movin'. An inch an hour. Wow. Kind of like UPS.
And in an unrelated story, every citizen of the United States will tomorrow receive from the federal government a sum of money totalling between zero and 500,000 dollars. Enjoy.
The sky is falling in!
Two stars poised to merge
Two dense stars whipping around each other at breakneck speed may be the strongest known source of Einstein's space-trembling gravity waves.
The double star - called RX J0806 - was discovered in 1994 in X-rays. Later shown to be blinking on and off every 5.4 minutes, the two-star setup is believed to be a pair of white dwarfs - the dense ashes of burnt-out stars - rotating around each other. Strohmayer, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, presented data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory that shows the time between the X-ray blips is decreasing by 1.2 milliseconds every year. The implication is that the dwarfs are orbiting faster and faster, as they gradually fall into each other at a rate of one inch per hour.
Strohmayer said the two dwarfs should continue losing energy to gravity waves and merge between 500,000 and one million years from now.
Watch out. The stars are movin'. An inch an hour. Wow. Kind of like UPS.
And in an unrelated story, every citizen of the United States will tomorrow receive from the federal government a sum of money totalling between zero and 500,000 dollars. Enjoy.
Something tells me that I'm getting zero dollars. But that's just a hunch. I think I'll be holding my breathe anyway.
You may have overlooked the even more scary story about the two supermassive black holes found in the same galaxy on a collision course with one another: "Pair of Supermassive Black Holes Inhabit Same Galaxy, Destined to Collide". (But I'm disappointed --they never include a photo of the black holes.)
i'm getting $5, i can feel it in my bones
That black hole thing is no joke, by the way.
But don't worry, they aren't predicted to produce an enormous, spinning vortex of doom and destruction. They're just going to rearrange a couple of the stars in the their galaxy. You can now resume your normal sleeping habits.
Lemme know when that big fiver comes in