{"id":110662,"date":"2020-07-30T17:02:17","date_gmt":"2020-07-31T00:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/astrophysicists-observe-long-theorized-quantum-phenomena"},"modified":"2020-07-30T17:02:17","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T00:02:17","slug":"astrophysicists-observe-long-theorized-quantum-phenomena","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/astrophysicists-observe-long-theorized-quantum-phenomena","title":{"rendered":"Astrophysicists observe long-theorized quantum phenomena"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astrophysicists-observe-long-theorized-quantum-phenomena.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>At the heart of every white dwarf star\u2014the dense stellar object that remains after a star has burned away its fuel reserve of gases as it nears the end of its life cycle\u2014lies a quantum conundrum: as white dwarfs add mass, they shrink in size, until they become so small and tightly compacted that they cannot sustain themselves, collapsing into a neutron star.<\/p>\n<p>This puzzling relationship between a white dwarf\u2019s mass and size, called the mass-radius relation, was first theorized by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the 1930s. Now, a team of Johns Hopkins astrophysicists has developed a method to observe the phenomenon itself using <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/astronomical+data\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">astronomical data<\/a> collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and a recent dataset released by the Gaia Space Observatory. The combined datasets provided more than 3,000 white dwarfs for the team to study.<\/p>\n<p>A report of their findings, led by Hopkins senior Vedant Chandra, is now in press in <i>Astrophysical Journal<\/i> and available online on arXiv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the heart of every white dwarf star\u2014the dense stellar object that remains after a star has burned away its fuel reserve of gases as it nears the end of its life cycle\u2014lies a quantum conundrum: as white dwarfs add mass, they shrink in size, until they become so small and tightly compacted that they [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,1617,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-quantum-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}