Tag: white dwarfs
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Learning about weird star corpses from the way they shake
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] ‘Dwarfquakes’ Reveal the Future of Our Universe Dying stars were an enigma—until an astronomer measured seismic shifts on them, giving us clues about the sun’s future and the expansion…
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Listening to the sounds of the cosmos
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Last year, I went to a conference in Florida to hear — and in some cases meet — some of the leading thinkers in the study of gravitational waves.…
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A white dwarf murder mystery
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] What killed the white dwarfs? (Aside from the giant explosion) Merger or extra matter? Two papers come to opposite conclusions For Ars Technica: Type Ia supernovae are explosions that…
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General relativity holds up under extreme gravity test
The general theory of relativity is the reigning champion of gravitational theories: it’s withstood tests in the Solar System, near black holes, and in binary systems. Most recently, astronomers performed detailed observations of a pulsar-white dwarf binary system, which provided an exquisite example of general relativity in action. Pulsars and white dwarfs are both the…
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Death of a white dwarf, 10 billion years later
White dwarfs are the remnants of the cores of stars like our Sun. They have the mass of a star packed into the volume of Earth, but when they die, their light can be detected across the observable Universe. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope identified the farthest white dwarf supernova yet seen, one which…
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Baby boom-ers could be a new type of white dwarf supernova
White dwarf supernovas—more officially known as type Ia supernovas—are important to cosmologists because they all explode in very similar ways. That means they can be used to measure distances to faraway galaxies. However, a peculiar type of supernova, first identified in 2002, has a lot in common with type Ia explosions, but with a lot…
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Supernovas and Marvin the Martian
Supernovas are some of the most violent phenomena in the cosmos, but we’re in no immediate danger from one. However, astronomers would really really really like one to go off relatively nearby during our lifetimes, since we would learn a lot from observing one. My latest piece at Ars Technica is a gallery showing some…
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Living planets in a stellar graveyard
When our Sun runs out of nuclear fuel, it will shed its outer layers, while what’s left of the core will remain as a white dwarf: an object the size of Earth, but far more massive. During the final stages of the Sun’s life, Earth is likely to perish as a habitable world, but that’s…
Bowler Hat Science 