About 97 percent of dying stars turn into a burning stellar body that has a tremendous ability to swallow objects, called a “white dwarf”, which is one of the most dense objects in the universe.
According to “Reuters”, scientists announced that a “white dwarf” that was discovered recently, set a record in this regard, as it hoards a huge mass in a small size.
And scientists said, today, Wednesday, that the mass of this white dwarf, which has enormous gravity and rotates very quickly, exceeds the mass of the sun by 35%, but its diameter is only slightly more than the diameter of the Earth’s moon.
This means that the dwarf has the largest mass and, unexpectedly, the smallest known white dwarf size, thanks to its enormous density.
There are no other objects more dense than white dwarfs except black holes and neutron stars.
The method of birth of this white dwarf, which was named (ZTFJ 1901 + 1458), was also unusual.
It seems that this dwarf came as a result of a binary star system, where two stars revolve around each other, then each star turns separately into a white dwarf at the end of its life cycle, and then they move towards each other and merge into one entity.
Ilaria Kayadzu, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said that if this combined mass increased only slightly, this merger would have resulted in a massive star explosion called a supernova or (supernova). She stated that it could still explode at any moment in the future.
“This white dwarf has really reached its limits,” she added. “We have discovered an object that has reached an extreme in terms of how small and heavy a white dwarf can reach,” she said.
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