Thursday, 9 February 2023 – 13:09 WIB
LIVE Techno – Astronomers will take measurements of isolated white dwarfs or the gnarled husks of dead stars, using Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity decades ago.
The findings confirm astronomers’ predictions about how massive white dwarfs can be and could help explain the strange and incredibly dense matter that makes up stellar remnants.
In the new study, astronomers used the legendary Hubble Space Telescope to measure the mass of a self-contained white dwarf called LAWD 37, according to a study published in the March issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Although astronomers have weighed white dwarfs in binary star systems — systems in which two stars orbit the same center of mass — LAWD 37 is the first white dwarf to be measured separately, according to the Live Science website, Thursday, February 9, 2023.
A research team led by University of California Santa Cruz astronomer Peter McGill used a unique property of the universe to make this pioneering measurement, the fact that gravity warps space-time.
As LAWD 37 passes in front of a bright, distant star, the light from the background star bends around a nearby white dwarf in a process known as gravitational microlensing, which was originally predicted by Einstein. When LAWD 37 bends starlight, it appears to shift slightly across the sky—an effect Hubble can detect with amazing precision.
