Astronomers are used to dealing in extremes, but no one had ever discovered anything like this before: a pair of superdense stars a mere 80,000 miles apart, locked in a gravitational embrace, one orbiting the other every 11 1/2 minutes and spewing X rays at a temperature of 50 million degrees Fahrenheit. Says Nicholas White of the European Space Agency's EXOSAT observatory in Darmstadt, West Germany: "What we've got is a system you could fit between the earth and the moon that generates 100,000 times more luminosity than the sun."
That luminosity is largely manifested not in visible light but in...
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