{"id":184598,"date":"2024-03-09T01:59:46","date_gmt":"2024-03-09T07:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/astrophysicists-unveil-new-phenomenon-challenging-textbook-definition-of-white-dwarf-stars"},"modified":"2024-03-09T01:59:46","modified_gmt":"2024-03-09T07:59:46","slug":"astrophysicists-unveil-new-phenomenon-challenging-textbook-definition-of-white-dwarf-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/astrophysicists-unveil-new-phenomenon-challenging-textbook-definition-of-white-dwarf-stars","title":{"rendered":"Astrophysicists unveil new phenomenon challenging textbook definition of white dwarf stars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astrophysicists-unveil-new-phenomenon-challenging-textbook-definition-of-white-dwarf-stars2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists have revealed why some white dwarfs mysteriously stop cooling\u2014changing ideas on just how old stars really are and what happens to them when they die.<\/p>\n<p>White dwarf stars are universally believed to be \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/dead+stars\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">dead stars<\/a>\u2019 that continuously cool down over time. However, in 2019, data from the European Space Agency\u2019s (ESA\u2019s) Gaia satellite discovered a population of white dwarf stars that have stopped <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/cooling\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cooling<\/a> for more than eight billion years. This suggested that some <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/white+dwarfs\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">white dwarfs<\/a> can generate significant extra energy, at odds with the classical \u2018dead star\u2019 picture, and astronomers initially were not sure how this could happen.<\/p>\n<p>Today, new research <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-024-07102-y\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature<\/i>, led by Dr. Antoine B\u00e9dard from the University of Warwick and Dr. Simon Blouin from the University of Victoria (Canada), unveils the mechanism behind this baffling observation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists have revealed why some white dwarfs mysteriously stop cooling\u2014changing ideas on just how old stars really are and what happens to them when they die. White dwarf stars are universally believed to be \u2018dead stars\u2019 that continuously cool down over time. However, in 2019, data from the European Space Agency\u2019s (ESA\u2019s) Gaia satellite discovered [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184598","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}