{"id":221613,"date":"2025-09-09T15:09:19","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T20:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/white-dwarf-stars-could-create-surprisingly-common-long-lived-habitable-zones"},"modified":"2025-09-09T15:09:19","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T20:09:19","slug":"white-dwarf-stars-could-create-surprisingly-common-long-lived-habitable-zones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/white-dwarf-stars-could-create-surprisingly-common-long-lived-habitable-zones","title":{"rendered":"White dwarf stars could create surprisingly common long-lived habitable zones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/white-dwarf-stars-could-create-surprisingly-common-long-lived-habitable-zones2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new study by Manuel Barrientos and colleagues from the University of Oklahoma reveals that between 0.6% and 2.5% of white dwarfs in our solar neighborhood undergo dramatic cooling delays that could extend habitable zones for billions of additional years. The secret lies in an element known as neon-22, which, after carbon and oxygen, is the most abundant element inside white dwarfs.<\/p>\n<p>When white dwarfs contain at least 2.5% neon-22 by mass, they undergo a process called \u201cdistillation\u201d as their cores crystallize. The research team discovered this occurs because the solid crystals become depleted in neon-22 compared to the surrounding liquid, making them lighter and causes them to float upward where they melt. This astronomical equivalent of a lava lamp releases enormous amounts of gravitational energy, effectively putting the white dwarf\u2019s cooling on pause for up to 10 billion years.<\/p>\n<p>The neon-22 forms during the star\u2019s lifetime through a well understood process. During the helium burning stage, nitrogen-14 (produced by the CNO cycle) transforms into neon-22. This means stars with higher initial abundances of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (collectively called \u201cmetallicity\u201d) produce more neon-22 in their white dwarf descendants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study by Manuel Barrientos and colleagues from the University of Oklahoma reveals that between 0.6% and 2.5% of white dwarfs in our solar neighborhood undergo dramatic cooling delays that could extend habitable zones for billions of additional years. The secret lies in an element known as neon-22, which, after carbon and oxygen, is [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221613","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\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}