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In white dwarf stars, the positive nuclei are completely ionized – disassociated from the electrons – and closely packed – a million times more dense than the Sun. At this density gravity exerts immense force pulling the nuclei together. This force is balanced by the electron degeneracy pressure keeping the star stable. [4]
This solid state contrasts with degenerate matter that forms the body of a white dwarf, where most of the electrons would be treated as occupying free particle momentum states. Exotic examples of degenerate matter include neutron degenerate matter, strange matter, metallic hydrogen and white dwarf matter.
Sirius B, which is a white dwarf, can be seen as a faint point of light to the lower left 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.
Another example of a system that is not in the classical regime is the system that consists of the electrons of a star that has collapsed to a white dwarf. Although the temperature of white dwarf is high (typically T = 10 000 K on its surface [ 23 ] ), its high electron concentration and the small mass of each electron precludes using a ...
The concept of universal wavefunction was introduced by Hugh Everett in his 1956 PhD thesis draft The Theory of the Universal Wave Function. [8] It later received investigation from James Hartle and Stephen Hawking [9] who derived the Hartle–Hawking solution to the Wheeler–deWitt equation to explain the initial conditions of the Big Bang ...
The high mass density of white dwarfs was demonstrated in 1925 by American astronomer Walter Adams when he measured the gravitational redshift of Sirius B as 21 km/s. [19] In 1926, British astrophysicist Ralph Fowler used the new theory of quantum mechanics to show that these stars are supported by electron gas in a degenerate state.
In elementary quantum mechanics, the state of a quantum-mechanical system is represented by a complex-valued wavefunction ψ(x, t). More abstractly, the state may be represented as a state vector, or ket, |ψ . This ket is an element of a Hilbert space, a vector space containing all possible states of the system.
The pure mathematical quantum mechanics and classical mechanical models of stellar processes enable the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram to be annotated with known conventional paths known as stellar sequences—there continue to be added rarer and more anomalous examples as more stars are analysed and mathematical models considered.