white dwarf tagged posts

The total solar eclipse isn’t the only reason to keep your eyes to the sky this year. For the first time in 80 years, a star system 3,000 light years away will be visible to the naked eye thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime nova outburst.

NASA announced that the nova, which will create a “new” star in the night sky, will light up the night sky some time between now and September and be as bright as the North Star. One of only five recurring novae in our galaxy, it will be visible for a week before it fades back down.

Jonathan Blazek, an assistant professor of physics at Northeastern University, says this is an exciting moment for amateur astron...

The search for exoplanets—planets that orbit stars located beyond the borders of our solar system—is a hot topic in astrophysics. Of the various types of exoplanets, one is hot in the literal sense: hot Jupiters, a class of exoplanets that are physically similar to the gas giant planet Jupiter from our own neighborhood.

Unlike “our” Jupiter, hot Jupiters orbit very close to their stars, complete a full orbit in just a few days or even hours, and—as their name suggests—have extremely high surface temperatures. They hold great fascination for the astrophysics community...

White dwarf sheds light on the systemic chaos that occurs when a star dies. The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind — known as a white dwarf — is sucking in debris from both the system’s inner and outer reaches, UCLA astronomers and colleagues report today.

This is the first case of cosmic cannibalism in which astronomers have observed a white dwarf consuming both rocky-metallic material, likely from a nearby asteroid, and icy material, presumed to be from a body similar to those found in the Kuiper belt at the fringe of our own solar system.

“We have neve...

A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion — a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3...