Making waves.(BINARY STARS observations)(Brief Article) From: Science News | Date: June 18, 2005 | COPYRIGHT 2005 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

Locked in a deadly embrace, two white dwarf stars may be the strongest source of gravitational waves now flooding our galaxy. The stars appear to be separated by just one-fifth the Earth-moon distance.

New X-ray observations of the duo, which resides roughly 1,600 light-years from Earth, indicate that the dwarfs take just under 5.5 minutes to orbit each other and are the most-compact binary-star system known. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory also found that the pair's or...