New observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have detected excess amounts of infrared radiation around a pair of interacting binary stars. The finding suggests that the stars are surrounded by a large disk of cool dust, scientists say.

The binary star system is made up of one highly magnetic white dwarf star and a very low mass, cool object similar to a brown dwarf. A white dwarf is a dead star formed from the core of a star like our Sun when it exhausts its fuel for nuclear fusion.

The two stars are orbiting each other at about the distance from the Earth to the Moon and make a complete revolution around each other in only 80-90 minutes.

The circumbinary disks surrounding the two stars have been predicted on theoretical grounds and a few observational studies have attempted to find them, with mixed results.

The disks may be the remains of the large “mass-loss” episode that occurred during the formation of the white dwarf, scientists say. They also could be composed of material spewed from the binary in the form of strong winds (like a very dense version of our Sun’s solar wind), or material that was ejected during one or more previous nova explosions.

The finding was presented this week at the 207^th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: P. Marenfeld/NOAO/AURA/NSF