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 ...

What can white dwarf stars eating their own planets teach astronomers about planetary and solar system formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes ...

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 ...

White dwarfs, the compact remnants of low- to intermediate-mass stars, offer a unique window into the fate of planetary systems. Recent observational and theoretical work has revealed that many white ...

For the first time, researchers have found a way to describe conditions deep in the convection zone of “white dwarf” stars, which are home to some of the densest collections of matter in the Universe.

White dwarfs are the stars that will be left behind when stars like the sun "die," smoldering away in space as cooling stellar embers. Recent observations indicated that some of these stellar corpses ...

All sky view of the Milky Way taken by the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory. Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you’ll likely learn that they are “dead ...

Recent observations show that some white dwarf stars suddenly stop cooling. Now, scientists propose a 'fountain of youth' mechanism that may explain how these stellar husks avoid death for billions of ...

MIT astronomers utilized a space-based X-ray telescope to delineate critical features within a star system’s innermost region—an exceptionally energetic domain previously inaccessible to most ...