The discovery was made by Tom Marsh and Boris Gansicke from Warwick University’s Astrophysics Group alongside David Buckley from the South African Astronomical Observatory. The trio managed to spot a white dwarf pulsar 380 light years from Earth, located in the constellation of Scorpius. AR scorpii is the name they gave to the binary star that confirmed the aging hypothesis.
This historic binary star is made up of both a white dwarf around the size of Earth (but around 200,000 times denser) and a ‘nearby’ red star. With a distance only three times greater than that of the Earth and the Moon between them, the two celestial bodies are practically neighbors in galactic terms. Thanks to this relatively close proximity, the white dwarf pulsar bombards its poor red dwarf neighbor with all manner of electrical energy and particles during its two-minute rotational period. You can find more details about their historic findings here.
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