A white dwarf star that completes a full rotation once every 25 seconds is the fastest spinning confirmed white dwarf, according to a team of astronomers from the Universities of Sheffield and Warwick.
Astronomers have discovered that dying white dwarf stars can burn nuclear fuel in their outer shells, prolonging their lives. The discovery made using the Hubble Space Telescope runs contrary to the current view of white dwarfs as just slowly cooling inert star cores.
Astronomers think they have a new way to calculate the size of supermassive black holes: by studying the feeding patterns of these invisible giants.
Astronomers are revelling at the discovery of a white dwarf that is the largest ever seen. White dwarfs are the collapsed remnants of stars, and this latest find is roughly the size of the Moon and 1.35 times more massive than the Sun. Researchers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory made the discovery. To help characterize the dead star, astronomers turned to the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea and University of Hawaiʻi’s Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on Haleakalā, Maui.
The dead star is also spinning extremely fast and has a powerful magnetic field
Astronomers are looking for the bones of dead planets inside the corpses of dead stars — and they may have just found some.
Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and several ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a nearby white dwarf star called WD 1856+534.
White dwarfs are some of the strangest objects in the universe.
Telescope observations of thousands of these stripped-down stars confirm the trend
A white dwarf star called SDSS J124043.01+671034.68 (SDSS J1240+6710) is traveling at 900,000 km/h (559,234 mph) through our Milky Way Galaxy. It also has a particularly low mass for a white dwarf — only 40% the mass of our Sun — which would be consistent with the loss of mass from a partial supernova. According to new research, SDSS J1240+6710 was most likely a member of a binary system that survived a so-called thermonuclear supernova event, which sent it and its companion flying through the Milky Way in opposite directions.
