Paradoxically, white dwarf stars shrink as they gain mass

Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - 05:10 in Astronomy & Space

Telescope observations have confirmed a weird property of white dwarf stars: As they pack on more mass, they shrink in size. White dwarfs, the stripped cores of dead stars, are thought to have this counterintuitive quality because they contain an exotic material called degenerate electron gas. The more massive a white dwarf, the tighter its electrons must squeeze together to create an outward pressure strong enough to prevent the star from collapsing under its own weight. Astronomers had observed evidence of this size trend, predicted by scientists decades ago, in a smattering of white dwarfs. But data on thousands of stars now show that the rule holds up across a sweeping range of white dwarf masses, Vedant Chandra and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University report online July 28 at arXiv.org. Understanding how white dwarfs contract as they gain mass could give insight into the origins of type 1a supernovas, says astronomer and coauthor...

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