White dwarf

White dwarf stars are thought to follow very specific “rules” – if they’re over a certain mass limit, they’ll explode in a supernova with a very predictable brightness and time. But now Caltech astronomers have found a strange twist: white dwarfs used to explode at lower masses than they do today.

Human lives make it impossible to witness the full life cycles of stars, planets and galaxies. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, astronomers might be able to catch crucial moments playing out before their eyes. Now a team has done just that, watching as a red giant star goes through its death throes.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite was built to search for new planets, but astronomers at Ohio State found it could also observe supernovas created by exploding white dwarf stars. This means we might soon have a better idea about why they explode, and what they leave behind.

The cosmos is full of strange things, like planets made of diamond, mysterious radio bursts and quasars that shine like 600 trillion Suns. Now astronomers have spotted a bizarre star that may prove to be one of the rarest objects ever, with maybe as few as five or six of them in the galaxy.

Meteorites can tell us stories of ancient stars and long-lost planets. One of these stories has now been uncovered in a piece of space rock retrieved from Antarctica, containing grains from a stellar explosion that predates the Sun.

Scientists have discovered what they believe to be the dense, metallic remains of a planet surviving closer to the core of a dying star than had previously been thought possible. The discovery offers a tantalizing glimpse into what may become of our home solar system billions of years in the future.

A NASA-led citizen scientist project has discovered an ancient white dwarf that’s surrounded by large rings, which is shaking up our understanding of how these systems form.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the first direct evidence for the theory that the dying husks of ancient stars, known as white dwarfs, solidify into crystals as they age.

A white dwarf is one of the last stages of life for stars of a certain size, and it’s all downhill from there. But supercomputer simulations run by astronomers at LLNL suggest that these dying stars could be reignited by a close encounter with an enigmatic class of black hole.

The theory of relativity predicts that any two objects in a vacuum will fall at the same rate. Whether or not this applied to massive objects like planets and stars has long been debated, but now astronomers have shown that the phenomenon does hold true, meaning Einstein was right yet again.

A team of astronomers has identified a rare laser phenomenon shining from the heart of the planetary nebula Menzel 3, otherwise known as the Ant Nebula. The discovery suggests the presence of an as yet unseen companion star, hiding at the core of the chaotic cosmic structure.

Thanks to a global network of 18 robotic telescopes, researchers caught a brief blue glow in the sky which, they say, was the result of a different kind of supernova explosion. The find reveals surprising information about the companion star next to the white dwarf that sparked the spectacle.