White dwarfs, the glowing cores of dead stars, often host disks of dusty debris. However, these debris disks only appear 10-20 millions of years following the star’s violent Red Giant phase. A new ...

When stars run out of fuel and come to the end of their lives, the biggest ones explode in huge supernovas. But smaller stars go through a different change in which they throw off portions of their ...

Planetesimal orbits around a white dwarf. Initially, every planetesimal has a circular, prograde orbit. The kick forms an eccentric debris disk which with prograde (blue) and retrograde orbits (orange ...

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their ...

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you'll likely learn that they are 'dead stars' that continuously cool down over time. Astronomers are challenging this theory after ...

In exoplanetary science, white dwarfs are usually only an afterthought. Most extrasolar planet hunters are too busy looking for an Earth 2.0 to give these hyper-dense stellar remnants much ...

Astronomers have captured their second-ever glimpse into a rare celestial object: a white dwarf pulsar. Pulsars are typically envisioned as spinning neutron stars — a type of stellar remnant left by ...

"You shouldn't see any metals on the surface of a white dwarf unless the white dwarf is actively eating something." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

In a paper published today in Nature, scholars from the Institute for Advanced Study; the University of Victoria, Canada; and the University of Warwick, U.K., have proposed a new theory that explains ...