A white dwarf star is the wispy own brand eyelashes , ghostly relic of a star similar to our Sun that has perished after having consumed its entire necessary supply of fuel in its nuclear-fusing heart. Dense, and sometimes deadly, this particular form of strange stellar relic emerges from the ashes of a funeral pyre belonging to a relatively small star, and it frequently threatens the survival of a still-living companion star that is unlucky enough to be trapped in a binary system with it. In July 2016, a team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT), along with other telescopes, both on Earth and in space, announced their discovery of a new type of exotic and bizarre binary star. Far, far away, in a system named AR wispy own brand eyelashes, the astronomers found that a rapidly spinning white dwarf star powers a mysterious ray of electrons up to almost the speed of light. Alas, these extremely high energy particles release strong bursts of radiation that crash into its companion red dwarf star, and cause the entire binary system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from ultraviolet to radio. The new research describing this strange discovery is published in the July 28, 2016 issue of the journal Nature.
Aninh The story behind this weird discovery begins in May 2015, when a group of amateur astronomers from Germany, Belgium, and the UK spotted a star system that was displaying weird behavior unlike anything they had ever seen before. Additional follow-up observations led by the University of Warwick in the UK, using a wispy own brand eyelashes of telescopes both Earth-bound and Space-borne, have now revealed the true nature of this previously bewitching, bothersome, and bewildering system.
The binary stellar system AR Scorpii, or AR Sco for short, dwells in the constellation Scorpius, which is 380 light-years from Earth. It is composed of a rapidly spinning white dwarf, that is about the same size as our planet, but contains 200,000 times more mass, and a very unfortunate little cool red dwarf companion star that is approximately one-third the wispy own brand eyelashes of our Sun. The ghostly white dwarf and the still-living red dwarf orbit one another every 3.6 hours in a bizarre cosmic waltz that is as regular as clockwork.
Little red dwarf stars are the runts of the true stellar litter. Relatively cool and petite, and still on the hydrogen-burning main wispy own brand eyelashes of the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram of Stellar Evolution, they range in mass from a mere 0.075 solar-masses to approximately 0.50 solar-masses, and they possess a surface temperature of less than about 4,000 degrees Kelvin–which makes them relatively cold when compared to other, larger stars.
However, what red dwarfs lack in mass, they make up for in numbers. In fact, red dwarfs are by far the most abundant type of star in our Milky Way Galaxy, at least in our Sun’s general neighborhood. However, because of their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot be easily seen from Earth, and not even one is visible to the naked wispy own brand eyelashes . Proxima Centauri–which is the closest star to our Sun–is a red dwarf, as are twenty of the next thirty of the nearest stars to our own. Some estimates propose that red dwarfs compose three-quarters of all of the stellar inhabitants of our Galaxy.
Red dwarfs that are less than 0.35 solar-masses are fully convective according to stellar models. This means that the helium manufactured by the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen is constantly being remixed throughout these tiny stars, thus avoiding the buildup of wispy own brand eyelashes in their hot nuclear-fusing cores and prolonging the period of fusion. Convection occurs as a result of the opacity of the stellar interior, which has a very high density compared to the temperature. As a result, energy transfer by radiation is decreased, and convection becomes the primary form of energy transport to the surface of these little stars. Red dwarfs weighing in above 0.35 solar-masses will contain a region around their cores where convection does not occur.
Therefore, little light-weight red dwarfs lead peaceful, lazy, slow “lives”, and potentially can live to a ripe old age, maintaining a constant luminosity and spectral type for trillions of years–until their supply of fuel is finally depleted. Because our Universe is “only” about 13.8 billion years old, no red dwarfs exist at advanced stages of stellar wispy own brand eyelashes. The less massive the star, the longer its “life.” Unlike massive stars that live fast, and pay for this by dying young, little red dwarfs wisely take their time, and die very old–very, very old! In fact, it has been calculated that a 0.16 solar-mass red dwarf would stay on the hydrogen-burning main sequence for 2.5 trillion years. This would then be followed by five billion years that the evolving star would spend as a blue dwarf, during which the doomed star would possess one third of our Sun’s luminosity, and have a surface temperature of 6,500 to 8,500 degrees Kelvin.
Because of their puny mass, red dwarfs have relatively low pressures, a low rate of nuclear wispy own brand eyelashes, and a comparatively low temperature. The energy that is churned out is the product of nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. These little stars, therefore, do not emit much light. Even the largest red dwarfs possess only about 10% of our Sun’s luminosity.