![]() ![]() “It may seem counterintuitive, but smaller white dwarfs happen to be more massive," Caiazzo says. In the statement, study author Ilaria Caiazzo, a Caltech astrophysicist, explains that the star’s huge mass paired with its petite size isn’t so strange in the world of white dwarfs. ![]() More commonly, these pint-sized stars are about the size of Earth, which has a radius of 3,958 miles this white dwarf, by contrast, tacks just 248 miles onto the moon’s roughly 1,000-mile radius. The little star is so dense that researchers think it is the progeny of a merger between two formerly separate white dwarfs, they report in a study published this week in the journal Nature.Ī white dwarf emerges when certain stars begin to “peter out,” writes Emily Conover for Science News. The white dwarf was first spotted by Kevin Burdge, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, who was looking over all-sky images captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech's Palomar Observatory, according to a statement. The star, officially given the catchy designation of ZTF J190132.9+145808.7, is roughly the same size as our moon, but what this white dwarf lacks in diameter it makes up for in density with a mass about 1.3 times that of the sun. A newly discovered white dwarf star (right) is only slightly larger than the moon (left).Īstronomers have discovered the smallest white dwarf star ever documented around 130 lightyears from Earth, reports Leah Crane for New Scientist. ![]()
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