Chandrasekhar limit tagged posts

Teardrop Star reveals Hidden Supernova Doom

Teardrop star

Rare sighting of binary star system heading towards supernova. Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiralling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star.

The tragic shape is caused by a massive nearby white dwarf distorting the star with its intense gravity, which will also be the catalyst for an eventual supernova that will consume both. Found by an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists led by the University of Warwick, it is one of only very small number of star systems that has been discovered that will one day see a white dwarf star reignite its core.

New research published by the team today (12 July) in Nature Astronomy confirms that the two stars are in the early stages of a spiral that will likely end in a Type...

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Dark Matter Hiding in Stars may Cause Observable Oscillations

dark matter stars

This sequence shows snapshots of a star’s density when two dark matter cores collide, where the x-axis is the plane of collision (only half the space is shown, but the remaining space can be obtained by symmetry). Although the final configuration is more compact and massive than the original, the star does not collapse into a black hole because it ejects some of its mass, slowing down its growth so that it remains stable. Credit: Brito, et al. ©2015 American Physical Society Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-dark-stars-oscillations.html#jCp

Large amounts of hidden mass inside stars might be composed of extremely lightweight hypothetical particles called axions, which are a primary dark matter candidate...

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