Unique Facts about White Dwarfs, Hot Dense Star Carcasses Are Also Faint

SPACE — If you often read astronomy themes, you are probably familiar with white dwarfs. White dwarfs are what remains when stars like the Sun have exhausted their fuel.

Reporting from Space, white dwarfs are the dense, dim remnants or ‘corpses’ of stars. White dwarfs are the final stage of evolution of low and intermediate mass stars.

The end of childhood and middle childhood stars

The ultimate fate of a star depends largely on its mass. Large stars will eventually become supernovae. However, low or medium mass stars with masses less than 8 times the mass of the Sun will become white dwarfs at the end of their lives.

According to the American Space Agency (NASA), about 97 percent of the stars in the Milky Way will end up as white dwarfs.

Compared to the Sun, white dwarfs have a similar mass of carbon and oxygen despite being much smaller, similar to Earth.

White dwarfs are very hot but faint

According to NASA, the temperature of a white dwarf can exceed 100,000 Kelvin. Despite their scorching temperatures, white dwarfs have low luminosity due to their very small size.

Main sequence stars, including the sun, form from clouds of dust and gas pulled by gravity. How a star evolves throughout its life depends on its mass. The most massive stars, those with masses eight times the mass of the Sun or more, will never become white dwarfs.

Instead, at the end of its lifetime, a white dwarf will explode in a powerful supernova, leaving behind a neutron star or black hole.

At the end of their lives, low to medium mass stars, such as the sun, will swell into red giants. After that, the stars shed their outer layers to form a ring known as a planetary nebula. The core that remains is a white dwarf, a husk of a star in which no hydrogen fusion occurs.

White dwarfs are very dense
When a star runs out of fuel, it no longer experiences any outward thrust from the fusion process. The star will collapse in on itself.

White dwarfs have about the same mass as the Sun but about the same radius as Earth. According to Cosmosthis makes white dwarfs one of the densest objects in space.

Its density is surpassed only by neutron stars and black holes. According to NASA, the gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times the gravity on Earth. This means that a human weighing 68 kilograms on Earth would weigh 22.7 million kg on the surface of a white dwarf.