white dwarf
5
7.5
- noun
- /waɪt dwɑrf/
- Specialized
:
enana blanca
- After exhausting its nuclear fuel, the star transformed into a white dwarf, incredibly dense and faint compared to its earlier self.
- white dwarf star
- white dwarf, a stellar remnant
- white dwarf companion
And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again?
- And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again?
- And so we do see signatures of that planet on the white dwarf.
- But proving that is a little bit difficult because finding planets in orbit around white dwarfs is really hard.
- T Pixodus has a white dwarf which is very close to the Chandra Sekhar limit.
- And so then you get a neutron star far more dense than than a than than a white dwarf ever was.
- So basically the carbon nuclei inside the white dwarf starts start fusing together to form heavier nuclei.
- For meta to form a Newton star, you need a certain minimum mass, otherwise you get a white dwarf.
- I can't rule out that you will come up with some process that is going on in a white dwarf or whatever where the rest mass is an important contribution.
- What it is, is that was a white dwarf star, OK, that was in orbit essentially around a black hole.
Examples
-
For the first time ever, they saw stars that appear to be white dwarfs in a globular cluster.
Academic text (1994) -
It's a white dwarf, its the compressed heart of a star.
-
And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again?
-
What it is, is that was a white dwarf star, OK, that was in orbit essentially around a black hole.
-
That is the density of a white dwarf star, approximately the density of what the sun will be on death.
-
An active wind from the white dwarf then began to push the ejected material out of the system.
Academic text (1994) -
Speedman is a dying star, a white dwarf heading for a black hole.
-
The greater the mass of the companion, the more noticeable its effect on the white dwarf will be.
Academic text (1992) -
And the Sun will end its life as a white dwarf with this electron pressure balancing the gravity.
-
The star has since evolved into a white dwarf, a stellar remnant so hot it emits lots of ultraviolet photons.
Academic text (2005)
Synonyms
1
5.9
A small, very dense, faint star left when a star like the Sun stops burning its fuel
How Dense
- Specialized
162
5.1
- Specialized
14
7.4
- Specialized
5
7.5
- Specialized
3
6.8
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is partially compositional: a learner who knows 'white' and 'dwarf' can infer a small, pale object and likely guess it refers to a small white star (and many languages use similar compounds, e.g. Spanish 'enana blanca'). However the full, technical sense — an extremely dense stellar remnant after nuclear fuel exhaustion — is specialized domain knowledge not fully predictable from the constituents, so the expression is only partially transparent to a B1 learner.
Etymology
White dwarf comes from early astronomers who saw small, faint stars that looked very white but much smaller than normal stars. They used white for the colour and dwarf to show the stars were tiny leftovers, so the name now means 'a faint, extremely dense star'.