High-resolution images of the two globular star clusters Messier 3 and Messier 13 have revealed a surprising abundance of white dwarfs – the remnants of the universe.
According to Sci-News, white dwarfs are the “remains” of low-mass stars that have exhausted their nuclear fusion. These are stars with a mass of less than 8 times that of the Sun, which, when they are “dying,” expand to about 11 times the Sun’s mass before collapsing into a small white dwarf.
Globular Cluster Messier 13 – (Photo: HUBBLE/NASA/ESA)
According to a research team led by Dr. Jianxing Chen from the University of Bologna and the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, the study also found another surprising point: white dwarfs can still undergo stable nuclear fusion – they are not dead stars, but rather a “zombie”, a “living corpse” in a sense.
This may explain why rare star systems have been found where a few planets continue to exist peacefully around a parent star that has become a white dwarf.
The globular cluster Messier 13 contains two different types of white dwarfs: one type is the standard white dwarf, which cools rapidly; the second type accounts for up to 70% and consists of white dwarfs that have managed to retain their outer hydrogen layer, continuously burning hydrogen to slow down their cooling rate.
Meanwhile, the white dwarfs of Messier simply gradually cool their stellar cores.
The remarkable discovery about how some white dwarfs “challenge” the aforementioned death has just been published in Nature Astronomy, promising to continue to enhance our understanding of how an old star ages and dies.
