white dwarf tagged posts

This is a schematic view of the candidate planet’s orbit in L2 Puppis disk. Credit: © P. Kervella (CNRS / U. de Chile / Observatoire de Paris / LESIA)

Old Star offers sneak preview of the future. What will happen to Earth when, in a few billion years’ time, the Sun is a hundred times bigger than it is today? Using the most powerful radio telescope in the world, an international team of astronomers has set out to look for answers in the star L2 Puppis. 5 billion years ago, this star was very similar to the Sun as it is today.

“Five billion years from now, the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size,” says Professor Leen Decin from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy...

This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Noll (STScI), Acknowledgment: The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This image by Hubble shows the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow. The burned-out star ie white dwarf, is the white dot in the center. Our sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for another 5 billion years.

Our Milky Way Galaxy is littered with these stellar relics, ie planetary nebulae. The objects have nothing to do with planets...

This artist’s impression shows the strange object AR Scorpii. In this unique double star a rapidly spinning white dwarf star (right) powers electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star (left) and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio. Credit: M. Garlick/University of Warwick, ESA/Hubble

Astronomers using Hubble along with other telescopes on the ground and in space, have discovered a new type of exotic binary star: in the system AR Scorpii a rapidly spinning white dwarf star is powering electrons up to almost the speed of light...

White dwarf (right) stripping mass from the brown dwarf. Credit: Rene Breton, University of Manchester.

Astronomers have detected a sub-stellar object that used to be a star, after being consumed by its white dwarf companion. An international team of astronomers made the discovery by observing a very faint binary system, J1433 730 light-years away. The system consists of a low-mass object – 60X the mass of Jupiter – in an extremely tight 78-min orbit around a white dwarf (the remnant of a star like our Sun).

Due to their close proximity, the white dwarf strips mass from its low-mass companion. This process has removed about 90% of the mass of the companion, turning it from a star into a brown dwarf...