Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
They are not sufficiently massive to start full-scale carbon fusion, so they contract again, going through a period of post-asymptotic-giant-branch superwind to produce a planetary nebula with an extremely hot central star. The central star then cools to a white dwarf.
Sirius B, which is a white dwarf, can be seen as a faint point of light to the lower of the much brighter Sirius A. A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: in an Earth sized volume, it packs a mass that is comparable to the Sun.
The white dwarf cooling anomaly is an additional cooling delay that has been observed for ultramassive forms of these compact stellar remnants. [1] [2] As a white dwarf cools, crystallization of the interior releases energy, slowing the cooling rate. However, the cooling rates modelled on this crystal formation process do not always match that ...
This white dwarf started its life as a star about twice the sun's mass, living a lifespan of perhaps 1.2 billion years before entering its death throes. Many white dwarfs have a debris disk ...
They said its orbit is stabilizing perhaps because the outer layers of the white dwarf are being sucked into the black hole, providing a kick-back action preventing the object from crossing the ...
Sirius is a binary star consisting of a main-sequence star of spectral type A0 or A1, termed Sirius A, and a faint white dwarf companion of spectral type DA2, termed Sirius B. The distance between the two varies between 8.2 and 31.5 astronomical units as they orbit every 50 years. [25]
In stars of less than eight solar masses, the carbon produced by helium fusion does not fuse, and the star gradually cools to become a white dwarf. [4] [5] If they accumulate more mass from another star, or some other source, they may become Type Ia supernovae. But a much larger star is massive enough to continue fusion beyond this point.
The stars called white or degenerate dwarfs are made up mainly of degenerate matter; typically carbon and oxygen nuclei in a sea of degenerate electrons. White dwarfs arise from the cores of main-sequence stars and are therefore very hot when they are formed. As they cool they will redden and dim until they eventually become dark black dwarfs ...