Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Artist's concept of white dwarf aging Internal structures of white dwarfs. To the left is a newly formed white dwarf, in the center is a cooling and crystallizing white dwarf, and the right is a black dwarf. A white dwarf is stable once formed and will continue to cool almost indefinitely, eventually to become a black dwarf.
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. White dwarfs were observed in the 19th century, but the extremely high densities and pressures they contain were not explained until the 1920s.
As white dwarf stars form at the end of a star's main sequence evolutionary period, such a long-lived star system may have wandered far from the region where it originally formed. Thereafter a close binary system may spend another million years in the mass transfer stage (possibly forming persistent nova outbursts) before the conditions are ...
For a star of 1 M ☉, the resulting white dwarf is of about 0.6 M ☉, compressed into approximately the volume of the Earth. White dwarfs are stable because the inward pull of gravity is balanced by the degeneracy pressure of the star's electrons, a consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle. Electron degeneracy pressure provides a rather ...
White dwarfs are among the most compact objects in the cosmos, though not as dense as a black hole. Stars with up to eight times the mass of our sun appear destined to end up as a white dwarf.
Afterwards, all that will remain of the Sun is a white dwarf, an extraordinarily dense object, 54% of its original mass but only the size of Earth. Initially, this white dwarf may be 100 times as luminous as the Sun is now. It will consist entirely of degenerate carbon and oxygen but will never reach temperatures hot enough to fuse these ...
SDSS 1557 (SDSS J155720.77+091624.6, WD 1554+094) is a binary system composed of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf.The system is surrounded by a circumbinary debris disk.The debris disk was formed when a minor planet was tidally disrupted around the white dwarf in the past.
Findings suggest there may be star systems in the cosmos that could shed more light on white dwarf crystallisation Skip to main content. 24/7 Help. For premium support please call: 800-290-4726 ...