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A white dwarf's low luminosity comes from the emission of residual thermal energy; no fusion takes place in a white dwarf. [ 1 ] The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star.
Stars tend to fall only into certain regions of the diagram. The most prominent is the diagonal, going from the upper-left (hot and bright) to the lower-right (cooler and less bright), called the main sequence. In the lower-left is where white dwarfs are found, and above the main sequence are the subgiants, giants and supergiants.
A white dwarf is the remains of a dead star, composed of electron-degenerate matter. It is thought to be the final stage in the evolution of stars not massive enough to collapse into a neutron star or black hole – stars less massive than roughly 9 M☉.
Van Maanen 2, or van Maanen's Star, is the closest known solitary white dwarf to the Solar System. It is a dense, compact stellar remnant no longer generating energy and has equivalent to about 68% of the Sun's mass but only 1% of its radius. [9] At a distance of 14.1 light-years it is the third closest of its type of star after Sirius B and Procyon B, in that order. [10][11] Discovered in ...
The more massive a star is, the shorter its lifespan on the main sequence. After the hydrogen fuel at the core has been consumed, the star evolves away from the main sequence on the HR diagram, into a supergiant, red giant, or directly to a white dwarf.
The Chandrasekhar limit (/ ˌtʃəndrəˈʃeɪkər /) [1] is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star. The currently accepted value of the Chandrasekhar limit is about 1.4 M☉ (2.765 × 1030 kg). [2][3][4] The limit was named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. [5] White dwarfs resist gravitational collapse primarily through electron degeneracy pressure, compared to main sequence stars ...
^ "New X-ray observations of the hot subdwarf binary HD 49798/RX J0648.0–4418". academic.oup.com. Retrieved 2023-01-08. ^ a b c d e f David Taylor (2012). "White Dwarf Stars Near The Earth" (PDF). The Life and Death of Stars. Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences - Northwestern University. ^ a b c d e f g h i "White dwarfs within 10 parsecs".
Stellar isochrone. In stellar evolution, an isochrone is a curve on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, representing a population of stars of the same age but with different mass. [ 1] The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram plots a star's luminosity against its temperature, or equivalently, its color. Stars change their positions on the HR diagram ...