India, Aug. 12 -- An international team led by astronomers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) Pune, has identified an extraordinarily compact pair of white dwarfs that orbit each other once every six minutes and are spiralling towards one another at a rate faster than almost any other known system of the kind. The discovery could provide an important target for future Space-based gravitational wave observatories.

The system known as eRASSU J060839.5-704014 (eRASSU J0608) was originally discovered through the SRG eROSITA all-sky survey. The latest study, led by Rahul Sharma and professor Chandreyee Maitra, used observations from the Chinese-led Einstein Probe mission and NASA's NICER telescope along wi...