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Pulsar's orbit made to precess by its star's dragging the space-time around it

lpetrich

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A pulsar’s journey through swirling space-time shows astronomers how fast its binary companion spins | Astronomy.com
Fast rotating white dwarf drags its space-time in a cosmic dance | Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
Lense–Thirring frame dragging induced by a fast-rotating white dwarf in a binary pulsar system | Science

General relativity describes gravity as a distortion of space-time, and rotating objects will pull the surrounding space-time around them. This frame- ragging is a very weak effect, and for the Earth, it was detected by Gravity Probe B, an experiment using four precision-machined rotating spheres aboard a spacecraft.

Evidence for frame dragging was recently discovered by observing a pulsar that orbits a white dwarf star. The pulsar's orbit plane was observed to precess, and the amount of precession is about right for a rapidly-spinning white dwarf (period: around 100 seconds).

That pulsar is PSR J1141-6545
 
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