James McCormac

A pair of white dwarfs whirls in a deadly dance: one star steals helium from its neighbor, spinning up a glowing disk. The orbit shrinks, energy leaves as gravitational waves. The rate of approach has been measured — the future LISA detector will catch the signal in four years.

310 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a remarkable system: a 15 million-year-old star surrounded by two transiting gas giants with record-long orbits of 225 and 314 days. Observations with TESS, CHEOPS, and ground-based telescopes measured their radii and set upper limits on their masse