Gravitational Wave....causing a ripple in the fabric of space/time?

[Dover]

Astronomers find best gravitational wave prospect
15:32 01 June 2005

NewScientist.com news service

Two burned-out stars are spiralling towards each other so fast they may ripple the fabric of space-time more than any other source near Earth, suggest new observations. A future space mission may detect the ripples - or gravitational waves - within 10 years.

Massive, accelerating objects such as black holes and the dense corpses of stars are thought to release gravitational waves as they orbit each other. This allows them to fall inwards until they eventually collide and merge - unleashing even more powerful gravitational radiation.

Though widely theorised, no such waves have yet been detected. But new observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory may have identified the most likely candidate for a future detection. The space telescope has confirmed previous observations suggesting two white dwarfs - the burned-out embers of stars like our Sun - are whipping around each other every 321.5 seconds.

Tod Strohmayer, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, used Chandra to reveal that the pair's X-ray emission varies on that timescale - and is gradually quickening. Strohmayer thinks the emission comes from matter dropping from one star onto the other, and says the stars may be edging closer to each other by about 3 centimetres per hour.

Stellar cadavers
The pair, called RX J0806.3+1527, appear to be separated by just 80,000 kilometres - five times closer than the distance between the Earth and Moon. That makes them the closest of about 10 known white dwarf binaries.

"It's either the most compact binary known or one of the most unusual systems we've ever seen," says Strohmayer. "Either way it's got a great story to tell." The pair lies just 1600 light years from Earth........cont'd

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7450

[roguevalley]

1. I love this stuff. What would be the outcome for the earth? We'd

all lose a few minutes or gain them?

[Dudley_DUright]

2. Very little

since gravity waves of this amplitude squeeze and stretch space by a strain factor {(change in length)/length} of about 10^-21 or less. Unfortunately the frequency range of the current ground based detectors (LIGO in the US and others around the world) can't detect this low frequency waves, but LISA, the planed satellite based detector should be able to see these waves.

http://lisa.jpl.nasa.gov/

[hecate77]

3. Given that it would be waves, both

But the effect would be very tiny. We are talking here about just being barely able to detect them, so there would be no noticable affect on the human scale. Also, after all the waves passed, things would be more or less back to normal. Secondly, our own normal clocks would be uniformly affected, so we, embedded in the phenomenon, would not likely be able to tell anyway.