WHITE DWARF
Source: indianexpress
Why in News?
Astronomers have observed a Phenomenon called "Cosmic cannibalism" for the first time, A dead star is ripping apart its planetary system.
A star is ending its life so violently that the dead star left behind, called a white dwarf, is disrupting an entire planetary system by sucking in debris from both its inner and outer reaches
The white dwarf is consuming the rock-metallic and icy material, both of which are the Ingredients of the planet
About White dwarf
A white dwarf is formed when a low-mass star like our sun exhausts most of its fuel, which is usually very dense, dim and the size of the planet.
It is the last observable stage of evolution for low and medium-mass stars
- Compared to our sun, a white dwarf has similar carbon and oxygen mass though it is much smaller in size, similar to earth
- White dwarf temperature can exceed 1,00,000 Kelvin according to NASA
- Despite having too high temperature, luminosity of white dwarf is less because of their small size
When a star ends up at the end of its life depends upon how much mass it was born with, stars that have a lot of mass may end their lives as black holes or neutron stars
A low or medium mass star (mass less than 8 times of the Sun) will become a white dwarf
A typical white dwarf is about as massive as the sun, yet slightly bigger than the Earth, this makes white dwarfs one of the densest forms of matter, surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes
Important Points:
This case of cosmic cannibalism was diagnosed with the help of archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other NASA observatories
The researchers obtained the findings based on the analysis of material captured by the atmosphere of the nearby white dwarf star G238-44
