Astronomers spot 4 white dwarfs hiding behind red dwarf companions near Earth

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Astronomers have spotted four dead star white dwarf stars playing a game of cosmic hide-and-seek, all four of which were hiding in the glares of red dwarf companion stars.

This marks the first detection of white dwarfs existing in double star systems in our cosmic backyard. The white dwarfs are all located within around 65 light-years of Earth, and one of them is number nine in the top 10 closest white dwarfs to the solar system.

White dwarfs are the type of stellar remnants left behind when stars around the size of the sun run out of fuel needed for nuclear fusion . This leads to their cores collapsing. The lack of fusion also means these stellar remnants cool and become dim. Thus, the light of much larger and brighter red dwarf stars is incredibly effective at hiding white dwarfs.

"Nearby isolated white dwarfs are usually easy to find, but we couldn't see these four stars directly in visible wavelengths because their red dwarf companions were drowning out their light," team leader Mairi O'Brien of the University of Warwick in the UK said in a statement . "It's a reminder that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we can still find surprises if we look in the right way, at the right wavelengths."

Wobbles gave them away

Though astronomers have been diligently surveying our cosmic backyard for decades, white dwarfs are extremely good at remaining unseen. In fact, the only thing that gave these four hidden dead stars away? Curious "wobbles" caused in the motion of the stars they were hiding behind, like a hiding child causing a curtain to ripple.

The team followed up on these telltale clues by taking a closer look at these systems with NASA's long-serving Hubble Space Telescope . This investigation was conducted in ultraviolet light and using custom calibration to prevent flaring from the red dwarf companions from mimicking white dwarf signals.

This investigation not only revealed the four lurking white dwarfs, but also demonstrated that one of these systems, G 203-47, located just 25 light-years away, has some curious characteristics. Twenty-seven years elapsed between the initial radial wobble and the detection of this hidden dead star.

That isn't the weird thing, though. What is strange is that the red dwarf companion of this white dwarf only rotates once every 100 Earth days or so, yet it only takes about 15 days to orbit its dead star companion. This means that gravitational forces have failed to lock the red dwarf and white dwarf together, which is what happens in similar systems.

"What's fascinating is that G 203-47 shouldn't be rotating this slowly if it formed the same way as similar systems. This suggests that these binaries have had very different evolutionary histories," team member David Wilson, of the University of Colorado Boulder, said. "Some underwent violent, prolonged interactions early on that locked them tidally. Others, like G 203-47, experienced gentler, briefer encounters that left them in this unusual state."

An illustration of a red dwarf star orbiting a white dwarf dead star companion. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)) The discovery of these white dwarfs helps researchers better understand the population numbers of the dead stars throughout the Milky Way. In fact, predictions would have suggested finding roughly four to five closely orbiting white dwarf-red dwarf pairs within around 65 light-years of our solar system, so finding four should instill a lot of confidence in our current theoretical models.

"Only about 30% of red dwarfs within 20 parsecs [65 light-years] have been systematically surveyed for hidden white dwarf companions," team member and University of Warwick researcher Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay said in the statement. "We think there could be as many as nine or 10 additional binary systems in our local stellar environment that we haven’t found yet.

"If we put more targeted effort into observing red dwarfs, perhaps we will find more surprises like this."

The team's research was published on Tues (July 14) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) .