Sentences with phrase «orbiting white dwarf stars»

In this artist's conception, a Ceres - like asteroid is slowly disintegrating as it orbits a white dwarf star.

Not exact matches

The extremely strong gravity of a massive neutron star in orbit with a companion white dwarf star puts competing theories of gravity to a test more stringent than any available before

That happens if it has a companion star, as most stars in the galaxy do, and the white dwarf orbits it closely enough to steal material from it.

But it turns out white dwarfs can breach that tipping point in another situation: Instead of a giant star losing material to a white dwarf, two white dwarfs orbiting each other could slam together and explode.

«Asteroid ripped apart to form star's glowing ring system: Research includes first image of ring system orbiting a white dwarf.»

A nova can occur if the strong gravity of a white dwarf pulls material from its orbiting companion star.

At first glance this exploding star had all the features of a type Ia supernova, which happens when a small, dense white dwarf star steals material from an orbiting companion and then explodes.

Two white dwarf stars orbiting each other will collide in 900,000 years, possibly annihilating both.

The globular cluster M4 (left) hosts a pulsar circled by a white dwarf (arrow, right) and a Jupiter - sized planet orbiting both stars.

PSR J1713 +0747, as it is known, has a tiny white dwarf companion star, and the two orbit each other exceptionally predictably.

Badenes's team examined archival observations and found a white dwarf and neutron star orbiting one another extremely closely.

And even then, the planet would have to orbit a special kind of star, a white dwarf, for the CFCs to show up.

Both occur in systems where two stars orbit each other: a white dwarf sucks away the outer layers of a larger companion star until the smaller star reaches a critical mass, causing an explosion.

The detected water most likely came from a minor planet, at least 90 km in diameter but probably much larger, that once orbited the GD 61 star before it became a white dwarf around 200 million years ago.

A Type Ia supernova results from a white dwarf that's part of a binary system (that is, one that shares an orbit with another star) and was about twice the size of our sun during its life.

Those remnants went into orbit around the white dwarf — much like the rings around Saturn, Zuckerman said — before eventually spiraling onto the star itself, bringing with them the building blocks for life.

A white dwarf star in a binary orbit with a neighbour can slowly pull material off, gradually increasing its own...

«Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf, but we don't see a thing,» team member Bart Dunlap, a graduate student from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement.

So far, only about 10 percent of known pulsars are believed to be part of binary systems — most of them orbiting ancient white dwarf stars.

Building on past observations of the white dwarf called SDSSJ1043 +0855 (the dead core of a star that originally was a few times the mass of the Sun), which has been known to be gobbling up rocky material in its orbit for almost a decade, the team used Keck Observatory's HIRES instrument fitted to the 10 - meter Keck I telescope as well as data from the Hubble Space Telescope to measure and characterize the material being accreted by the star.

Based on that distance and the separation between the images of the A star, the M dwarf and the white dwarf, we can estimate that the white dwarf orbits roughly 2200 astronomical units (AU) away from the A star with the disk.

During that night, the scientists were able to measure the changing Doppler shift of the star NLTT 11748 as it orbited its faint, but more massive, white dwarf companion.