
© Mark Myers, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence/Swinburne University of Technology
Astrophysicists spend their time working on some truly mind-bending stuff but after two decades of observations, scientists have witnessed a pair of stars spinning so fast they literally bend both space and time.
The team has been tracking the orbit of the extraordinary binary star for about 20 years, using the CSIRO Parkes Observatory's 64-metre radio telescope.
The researchers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence of Gravitational Wave Discovery,
caught the spinning celestial bodies "frame-dragging" or, in other words, twisting both space and time with their immense gravity.The research, published Friday in the journal
Science, is yet more evidence for Einstein's theory of general relativity.
The binary star is made up of two stars. One is a white dwarf, a star whose nuclear fuel has run out, which is roughly the size of the Earth but has 300,000 times its density. The other is a neutron star which is somehow about 100 billion times the density of the Earth while only measuring approximately 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) in diameter.
All that matter is compressed into a star system with the catchy name
"PSR J1141-6545."
Comment: This ideologically-motivated bit of technology research is wrong on so many levels that its not even funny, but we have to start somewhere: Damore Lawsuit Exposes Extremist Ideology And Social Intolerance at Google