Tuesday, June 27, 2017

The fate of stars

How about this one? WD1202-04 is a white dwarf, what's left of a dead star. It has a brown dwarf orbiting so close together that eventually they will hit each other and explode.

To make things even more interesting, when the white dwarf was a red giant, the brown dwarf was inside it. Which should have torn it apart, but nope. It survived, likely barely (unlike any planets in the system).

Weird, eh? We keep finding all kinds of different stars and planets out there, and few of them seem to follow what we thought were the rules...

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