It is estimated that there are between 100 billion and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and recently astronomers announced that they may have discovered the smallest of them. It is a white dwarf star, similar in size to our Moon, but heavier than the Sun. The white dwarf is called a "very special" star because it has a mass much larger than the Sun, but is compressed into an object that is only slightly larger than the Moon. As a result , it became the largest known mass white dwarf , as well as the smallest white dwarf.
White dwarfs, usually about the size of Earth, are cooling, dim remnants of stars that die and are thrown into space after they run out of nuclear fuel. About 97% of the stars in the universe will eventually become white dwarfs at the end of their lives. The sun, for example, will one day face the same fate, evolving into one of these slow-burning wreckage in about 5 billion to 10 billion years.
This particular dead star, named ZTF J1901+1458, is located in the constellation Akira, about 130 light-years away. It's much smaller in diameter than Earth, only 2,670 miles (or 4,296 kilometers), about the size of the Moon, but 1.35 times the mass of the Sun. Scientists aren't entirely sure how the rare star formed, but it appears to have been created by two ancient stars that may have aged and depleted their fuel supplies at the same time before evolving into white dwarfs.
Over time, the binary stars get closer and closer, eventually merging into one. In general, if the mass of the parent star is too large, it will explode, forming a so-called la-type supernova. Instead of this, the two stars have come together to form the most massive white dwarf ever discovered. The reason may be that their quality is below a certain threshold. This process of merger also results in the formation of white dwarfs inheriting the rotational velocity of the combination of precursor stars — spinning wildly around the axis at a speed of 7 minutes/circle. In contrast, it takes the Sun 27 days to complete a rotation. This high-speed rotation also increases its magnetic field strength, which is 1 billion times stronger than the Sun's magnetic field.
This white dwarf may be small in size, but it contains enormous amounts of energy. It was discovered by a series of telescopes that assisted in the analysis of the Dead Planet. But it was first observed by the Zwicky Transient Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. The telescope scans the entire northern sky every two nights, looking for cosmic objects that flicker, move, or change in brightness. So, what will this strange white dwarf become? This so-called very special star may be on the verge of collapse. The researchers believe that the star has enough mass to potentially evolve into a smaller, denser object called a neutron star.
Neutron stars usually form when a star much more massive than our sun explodes as a supernova, leaving behind a tiny, ultra-dense object. They can be 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and at most about twice as large as the Sun, all squeezed into a star that is only 12 miles or so in diameter, or about the size of a city. A tablespoon mass of a star like this would weigh more than 1 billion tons on Earth.
If this hypothesis is correct, and the newly discovered small,massive white dwarf is on the verge of further collapse and gradually becoming one of these strange objects, then this could mean that many other neutron stars throughout the universe formed in this previously unknown way. However, like all new scientific discoveries, more questions are asked than answered. So we will have to wait until further research is complete before we can really begin to understand the largest but most massive multitude of white dwarfs in the universe discovered so far. So, what do you think of this strange dead planet? Please let me know in the comments section below.
Related knowledge:
The Sun is a star at the center of the Solar System. It is a near-perfect ball of thermal plasma, heated to blazing heat by the fusion reaction of its core, whose energy radiates mainly in the form of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation. By far, it is the most important source of energy for life on Earth. It is about 1.39 million kilometers (864,000 miles) in diameter, or 109 times the size of Earth. It has a mass of about 330,000 times that of Earth and accounts for 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system. About three-quarters of the Sun's mass is made up of hydrogen (73 percent); the rest is mostly helium (25 percent), and even smaller amounts of heavy elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.
By: Still said. , roundabout fish