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Sirius B, which is a white dwarf, can be seen as a faint point of light to the lower left of the much brighter Sirius A. A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: in an Earth sized volume, it packs a mass that is comparable to the Sun.
White dwarfs resist gravitational collapse primarily through electron degeneracy pressure, compared to main sequence stars, which resist collapse through thermal pressure. The Chandrasekhar limit is the mass above which electron degeneracy pressure in the star's core is insufficient to balance the star's own gravitational self-attraction.
In astrophysics, Chandrasekhar's white dwarf equation is an initial value ordinary differential equation introduced by the Indian American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, [1] in his study of the gravitational potential of completely degenerate white dwarf stars.
For a star of 1 M ☉, the resulting white dwarf is of about 0.6 M ☉, compressed into approximately the volume of the Earth. White dwarfs are stable because the inward pull of gravity is balanced by the degeneracy pressure of the star's electrons, a consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle. Electron degeneracy pressure provides a rather ...
White dwarfs are among the most compact objects in the cosmos, though not as dense as a black hole. Stars with up to eight times the mass of our sun appear destined to end up as a white dwarf.
This white dwarf started its life as a star about twice the sun's mass, living a lifespan of perhaps 1.2 billion years before entering its death throes. Many white dwarfs have a debris disk ...
As white dwarf stars form at the end of a star's main sequence evolutionary period, such a long-lived star system may have wandered far from the region where it originally formed. Thereafter a close binary system may spend another million years in the mass transfer stage (possibly forming persistent nova outbursts) before the conditions are ...
Findings suggest there may be star systems in the cosmos that could shed more light on white dwarf crystallisation Skip to main content. 24/7 Help. For premium support please call: 800-290-4726 ...