What’s slightly larger than our moon but almost 1.4 times more massive than our sun?
ZTF J1901+1458, one of the smallest white dwarf stars ever spotted by astronomers.
It’s quite an extreme star.
However, it starts to lose its outer layers and leave behind just an extremely dense core.
That’s what the research team saw in the ZTF data: the husk of a blown-out star.
The team believe the white dwarf was originallytwostars that danced with each other for billions of years.
“We are truly probing how massive a white dwarf can be.”
So what will happen to the white dwarf now?
That’s because weird things are happening in the super-dense core of a white dwarf.
Caiazzo describes a process at the subatomic scale, where electrons are being captured and forming neutrons.
“There are so many questions to address,” notes Caiazzo.
