| A newly spotted pair of tiny stars that holds the record for the longest-distance celestial embrace is bound by only a thread of gravity and might one day break up.
The stars are separated by 5,100 astronomical units (AU), where one AU is the distance between the Earth and Sun. Astronomers have dubbed the pair the Hang-loose Binary. The previous record holder for long-distance binary stars was the Koenigstuhl 1AB system, in which the stars are separated by about 1,800 AU.
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The weak gravitational tether binding the two stars in the Hang-loose Binary results in an orbital dance so slow that one orbit takes 500,000 years to complete. On a human scale, this system would appear as two baseballs orbiting each other about 200 miles (300 kilometers) apart.
The research, published in the April 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, throws a wrench in star-formation models, which would not predict that such a low-mass, wide binary setup could form and remain stable. Only about a half dozen very-low mass binary systems with separations greater than 50 AU are known.
Many unanswered questions still plague the finding, including the age of the objects and whether they should be classified as so-called red dwarfs or less-massive brown dwarfs.
Spotting stars
Astronomers led by Étienne Artigau of the Gemini Observatory in Chile discovered the system by comparing the locations of the stars from archival data collected 16 years apart. Observations with the Cerro Tololo 1.5-meter telescope confirmed the two stars were indeed traveling through space together about 200 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Phoenix.
Using an infrared spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope, the team estimated the objects reach temperatures of about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 degrees Celsius).
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