Smallest White Dwarf discovered

[BlueFox]

By Will Dunham

"In their death throes, roughly 97% of all stars become a smoldering stellar zombie called a white dwarf, one of the densest objects in the cosmos. A newly discovered white dwarf is being hailed as the most "extreme" one of these on record, cramming a frightful amount of mass into a surprisingly small package.

Scientists said on Wednesday this highly magnetized and rapidly rotating white dwarf is 35% more massive than our sun yet boasts a petite diameter only a bit larger than Earth's moon. That means it has the greatest mass and, counterintuitively, littlest size of any known white dwarf, owing to its tremendous density."

'Extreme' white dwarf sets cosmic records for small size, huge mass

In their death throes, roughly 97% of all stars become a smoldering stellar zombie called a white dwarf, one of the densest objects in the cosmos. A newly discovered white dwarf is being hailed as the most "extreme" one of these on record, cramming a frightful amount of mass into a surprisingly...

news.yahoo.com

 

[Addicted to hifi]

Interesting.

 

[tima]

son of Glóin ?

 

[astrotoy]

The heavier the white dwarf, the more gravity. The more gravity, the more compression. If it is too heavy and gets beyond the point where the electrons being tightly packed together can't stop the gravity from collapsing, the star becomes a neutron star - much more dense than a white dwarf (about the diameter of a large city). Heavier than that, the next stop is a black hole.

Larry