White dwarf

NASA has discovered a strange star system where a gas giant planet is tightly orbiting a tiny white dwarf. This the first sighting of such an arrangement, raising questions about how the planet survived the star’s expansive death in the first place.

The universe will most likely end by slowly fading to black over trillions of years. Now a theoretical physicist has calculated the last interesting event that will ever happen: the explosions of stars called black dwarfs, which don’t even exist yet.

A supernova may seem like a pretty final fate, but now astronomers have discovered a star that apparently survived this explosive process. It wasn’t without consequence, however – the star was kicked out of a binary orbit and flung across the galaxy.

Scientists have discovered a massive planet evaporating as it orbits the remains of a Sun-like star. This is the first time evidence of a huge planet orbiting a white dwarf has been observed, and it could help reveal the fate of our own solar system.

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.