Can White Dwarf Stars Help Solve the Cosmological Lithium Problem?
Exploring new method for measuring galactic evolution of lithium. For the first time, hard-to-track lithium has been identified and measured in the atmosphere of burned-out…
White Dwarf News
First Possible “Survivor” Planet Discovered by NASA Next to a Stellar Cinder
The violent events leading up to the death of a star would likely drive away any planets. The newly discovered Jupiter-size object may have arrived…
Insight Into Dark Energy From Spectacular Ultraviolet Flash – May Finally Explain How White Dwarfs Explode and the Creation of Iron
For just the second time ever, astrophysicists have spotted a spectacular flash of ultraviolet (UV) light accompanying a white dwarf explosion. An extremely rare type…
Exploring the Physics of White Dwarf Stars With Gravity Crystals [Video]
Scientists study how charged particles arrange themselves into crystalline patterns and apply what they learn to explore the interiors of white dwarf stars. Grab a…
GAIA Reveals For the First Time Crystallization in White Dwarfs
Data captured by ESA’s galaxy-mapping spacecraft Gaia has revealed for the first time how white dwarfs, the dead remnants of stars like our Sun, turn…
Fast-Growing White Dwarf Surprises Astronomers
Astronomers have detected a bright X-ray outburst from a star in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy almost 200,000 light years from Earth. A…
Astrophysicists Show That Starving White Dwarfs Are Binge Eaters
University of Canterbury astrophysicist Dr. Simone Scaringi has made an unexpected and exciting new discovery related to the way white dwarfs grow in space. The…
Astrophysicists Observe Contracting White Dwarf Star For The First Time
An international team of astronomers has found the first observational evidence for a contracting white dwarf. Constant high spin-up rate of a star of this…
Astronomers View One of the Most Luminous White Dwarf Eruptions Ever Seen
Using the Swift Satellite Observatory, scientists reveal what was likely the most luminous white dwarf eruption ever seen. Astronomers have today announced that they have…
Exomoons Likely Play a Significant Role in White Dwarf Pollution
New research from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics identifies exomoons as a likely source of the apparent accretion of rocky material onto some white dwarf…
Astronomers Discover White Dwarf Stars in the Disc of the Milky Way
A team of astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has discovered white dwarf stars in the disc of the Milky Way galaxy, and measured…
Astronomers Discover a Dwarf Star That Contains Life’s Building Blocks
Using the Keck Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers reveal the existence of a white dwarf star whose atmosphere is rich in carbon and…
Hubble Reveals the Massive Remains of a Comet-Like Object Scattered Around a White Dwarf
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a team astronomers has found the first evidence of the remains of a comet-like object scattered around a burned-out star….
VLT Maps Out the Shattered Remains of an Asteroid Around a White Dwarf
Using the Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers has studied in detail for the first time the remains of a fatal interaction between…
Kepler Discovers a Planetary Object Being Vaporized by a White Dwarf
Using the repurposed Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered evidence of a tiny, rocky object being torn apart as it spirals around a white dwarf…
Astronomers Discover Companions of Millisecond Pulsars
Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have identified the orbiting companions to five-millisecond pulsars in the globular…
White Dwarf PG1149+057 Displays ‘Irregular Heartbeats’
Using Kepler data, a team of astronomers has observed a white dwarf star displaying massive arrhythmic outbursts, which broke the star’s regular pulse and significantly…
Spitzer Reveals Possible “Rejuvenated” Planet
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected excess infrared light around white dwarf PG 0010+280. Scientists aren’t sure where the light is coming from, but one…