Astronomers may have finally solved the mystery of how superdense dead stars called white dwarfs keep their heavy metal shells fresh — by cannibalizing what remains of their planetary systems. White ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Illustration of an early stage of an icy body being torn apart by the intense gravity of a white dwarf By Will Dunham WASHINGTON ...

Astronomers have found a remarkable pair of stars that may finally prove a long-debated theory. Described in the journal Nature Astronomy, this duo offers the strongest evidence yet that type 1a ...

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Astronomers have observed a white dwarf - a highly compact Earth-sized stellar ember - that is creating a colorful shockwave as it moves through space, ...

Artist’s impression of the long-period transient J1634+44, revealed to be a white dwarf with a companion. Credits: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/P. Vosteen. LOFAR is a low-frequency radio astronomy array that ...

In our nearby stellar neighborhood, a burned-out star is snacking on a fragment of a Pluto-like object. With its unique ultraviolet capability, only NASA's Hubble Space Telescope could identify that ...

In exoplanetary science, white dwarfs are usually only an afterthought. Most extrasolar planet hunters are too busy looking for an Earth 2.0 to give these hyper-dense stellar remnants much ...

In an ancient star system expected to be stable and dormant, scientists found a 3 billion-year-old white dwarf star still tearing apart massive quantities of rock. “The rate we’ve seen rock consumed ...

White dwarfs, the glowing cores of dead stars, often host disks of dusty debris. However, these debris disks only appear 10-20 millions of years following the star’s violent Red Giant phase. A new ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London.View full profile Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum ...

Astronomers have discovered the smallest and most massive white dwarf ever seen. The smoldering cinder, which formed when two less massive white dwarfs merged, is heavy, “packing a mass greater than ...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have observed a white dwarf – a highly compact stellar ember – that appears to have gobbled up an icy world akin to the dwarf planet Pluto, a finding with ...