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The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star. There are currently thought to be eight white dwarfs among the hundred star systems nearest the Sun. [2] The unusual faintness of white dwarfs was first recognized in 1910.
Its companion, Sirius B, is a star that has already evolved off the main sequence and become a white dwarf. Currently 10,000 times less luminous in the visual spectrum, Sirius B was once the more massive of the two. [84] The age of the system has been estimated at 230 million years.
Sirius B: 1852 Sirius system Sirius B is also the nearest white dwarf (as of 2005) [2] [3] First found in a binary star system First double white dwarf system LDS 275: 1944 L 462-56 system [4] First solitary white dwarf Van Maanen 2: 1917 Van Maanen's star is also the nearest solitary white dwarf [5] First white dwarf with a planet WD B1620− ...
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 ...
White dwarfs are stellar remnants produced when a star with around 8 solar masses or less sheds its outer layers into a planetary nebula. The leftover core becomes the white dwarf. It is thought that white dwarfs cool down over quadrillions of years to produce a black dwarf. [14] Neutron star: RX J0720.4−3125: 0.0000064683 – 0.0000077332
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.
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1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers the white dwarf maximum mass limit. 1933 – Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade propose the neutron star idea and suggest that supernovae might be created by the collapse of normal stars to neutron stars—they also point out that such events can explain the cosmic ray background.