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A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to Earth's. No nuclear fusion takes place in a white dwarf. Instead, the light it radiates comes from the residual heat stored in it. [1] The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star.
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.
The well-known binary star Sirius, seen here in a Hubble photograph from 2005, with Sirius A in the center, and white dwarf, Sirius B, to the left bottom from it. A binary star or binary star system is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other.
The revised Yerkes Atlas system [7] listed a dense grid of A-type dwarf spectral standard stars, but not all of these have survived to this day as standards. The "anchor points" and "dagger standards" of the MK spectral classification system among the A-type main-sequence dwarf stars, i.e. those standard stars that have remained unchanged over years and can be considered to define the system ...
Nearest white dwarf: Sirius B: 1852 8.6 light-years (2.6 pc) Sirius B is also the second white dwarf discovered, after 40 Eridani B. [9] [25] [26] Nearest brown dwarf: Luhman 16: 2013 6.5 light-years (2.0 pc) This is a pair of brown dwarfs in a binary system, with no other stars. [27] Nearest Luminous Blue Variable: P Cygni: 5,251 light-years ...
Sirius B: 1852 Sirius system Sirius B is also the nearest white dwarf (as of 2005) [1] [2] First found in a binary star system First double white dwarf system LDS 275: 1944 L 462-56 system [3] First solitary white dwarf Van Maanen 2: 1917 Van Maanen's star is also the nearest solitary white dwarf [4] First white dwarf with a planet WD B1620− ...
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The closest encounter to the Sun so far predicted is the low-mass orange dwarf star Gliese 710 / HIP 89825 with roughly 60% the mass of the Sun. [4] It is currently predicted to pass 0.1696 ± 0.0065 ly (10 635 ± 500 au) from the Sun in 1.290 ± 0.04 million years from the present, close enough to significantly disturb the Solar System's Oort ...