If I remember correctly there wont be any details to see. A white dwarf is a featureless almost perfect sphere made up of degenerate matter. It will look like a circle drawn in MS paint.
What kind of Star is THIS?
- Thread starter EdwinStowe
- Start date
If I remember correctly there wont be any details to see. A white dwarf is a featureless almost perfect sphere made up of degenerate matter. It will look like a circle drawn in MS paint.
brown dwarf stars are gas giants about 50-80 jupiter masses, but are oddly the same size as jupiter (therefore more dense). they have enough mass and internal pressure to be hotter that a mere planet, but are too weak to actually begin hydrogen-hydrogen fusion (the definition of what makes a "star")
red dwarf stars are fully legitimate stars (they have H-H fusion going on inside), but are just really really small. just enough to be a star. this type of star is the longest lived type, often burning for 40-50 billion years. The " Methuselah Star" is so old it appears to be older than the universe (14.5 billion years old)?!
White dwarves are a whole other thing. They are the leftover cores of supernovae. Whereas a brown dwarf is a "failed star", a white dwarf is a "failed black hole. For much the sane reasons : not enough mass.
The dark halo around this Brown Dwarf can be attributed to its solar wind (or would it be dwarf wind?) Being just too cold to be ionized, and therefore accumulates around the dwarf at a proto planetary nebula sort of thing. (Trying real hard not to make a joke here)
red dwarf stars are fully legitimate stars (they have H-H fusion going on inside), but are just really really small. just enough to be a star. this type of star is the longest lived type, often burning for 40-50 billion years. The " Methuselah Star" is so old it appears to be older than the universe (14.5 billion years old)?!
White dwarves are a whole other thing. They are the leftover cores of supernovae. Whereas a brown dwarf is a "failed star", a white dwarf is a "failed black hole. For much the sane reasons : not enough mass.
The dark halo around this Brown Dwarf can be attributed to its solar wind (or would it be dwarf wind?) Being just too cold to be ionized, and therefore accumulates around the dwarf at a proto planetary nebula sort of thing. (Trying real hard not to make a joke here)
You sound like you know your stuff but isn't there some deuterium fusion going on in brown dwarfs?
Fun fact: Jupiter is about as big as a planet can get size wise. If you add more mass the increased gravity stops it from getting any bigger, it just gets more dense.
The 'failed black hole' leftover core of supernova is a neutron star, they are more massive and dense than a white dwarf.
White dwarfs are formed when stars like our Sun reach the end of their life. They turn into a red giant for a few million years but do not have enough mass to go supernova. Once they've burned the last of their fuel and shed the outer layers a white dwarf is what remains.
Actually, white dwarfs are the remaining, no-longer fusing stellar cores, held up by electron degeneracy pressure, left behind when stars (such as the sun) too small to end their days in a cataclysmic supernova explosion, throw off their stellar envelopes as a planetary nebula at the end of their red giant phase. While incredibly dense, packing something in the neighbourhood of a solar mass into a sphere the size of the Earth, they have nothing on neutron stars, which fit your description better.
Neutron stars are the left-overs of some supernova explosions, where the collapsing core has enough mass that electron degeneracy pressure can't counterbalance gravity. The resulting implosion and then explosion leaves behind an ultra-dense object, packing up to several solar masses into an object with a radius of around 10 kilometers. This object is held up by neutron degeneracy pressure, the electrons and protons having been forced to combine into neutrons by gravity.
When even more massive stars explode in a supernova or even a hypernova, the remnant, too massive to be held up even by neutron degeneracy pressure, will be a black hole.
However, some very massive low-metalicity stars, of at least 130 solar masses, may end their days in a pair-instability supernova, where runaway thermonuclear fusion in the core blasts the entire star apart, leaving behind no remnant.
Try Hermitage, it's main star is the same type I believe. It also contains a number of moons/planets(11 or 12) you can explore, compared to the extremely empty WISE 1647 system.