{"id":225649,"date":"2025-11-22T05:03:45","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T11:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/scientists-get-a-first-look-at-the-innermost-region-of-a-white-dwarf-system"},"modified":"2025-11-22T05:03:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T11:03:45","slug":"scientists-get-a-first-look-at-the-innermost-region-of-a-white-dwarf-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/scientists-get-a-first-look-at-the-innermost-region-of-a-white-dwarf-system","title":{"rendered":"Scientists get a first look at the innermost region of a white dwarf system"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-get-a-first-look-at-the-innermost-region-of-a-white-dwarf-system2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some 200 light years from Earth, the core of a dead star is circling a larger star in a macabre cosmic dance. The dead star is a type of white dwarf that exerts a powerful magnetic field as it pulls material from the larger star into a swirling, accreting disk. The spiraling pair is what\u2019s known as an \u201cintermediate polar\u201d \u2014 a type of star system that gives off a complex pattern of intense radiation, including X-rays, as gas from the larger star falls onto the other one.<\/p>\n<p>Now, MIT astronomers have used an X-ray telescope in space to identify key features in the system\u2019s innermost region \u2014 an extremely energetic environment that has been inaccessible to most telescopes until now. In an open-access study <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae11b5\">published in the <em>Astrophysical Journal<\/em><\/a>, the team reports using NASA\u2019s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) to observe the intermediate polar, known as EX Hydrae.<\/p>\n<p>The team found a surprisingly high degree of X-ray polarization, which describes the direction of an X-ray wave\u2019s electric field, as well as an unexpected direction of polarization in the X-rays coming from EX Hydrae. From these measurements, the researchers traced the X-rays back to their source in the system\u2019s innermost region, close to the surface of the white dwarf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some 200 light years from Earth, the core of a dead star is circling a larger star in a macabre cosmic dance. The dead star is a type of white dwarf that exerts a powerful magnetic field as it pulls material from the larger star into a swirling, accreting disk. The spiraling pair is what\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225649","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\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}