A 23-min binary in TESS
In November 2023, a manuscript led by Matthew Green from the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg, Germany and including members of the BUWD group (Green, Hermes, Barlow et al. 2023) announced the discovery of the shortest-period binary system yet found by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)! Although TESS is tuned to finding transiting exoplanets, we used the facility to discover a pair of stars orbiting one other roughly every 23 minutes, one of the brightest (and closest) AM CVn binaries ever found. This is the second system we have recently found from TESS that will be detectable in gravitational wave radiation when we launch space-based interferometers in the coming decades. The manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.