White dwarfs, the glowing cores of dead stars, often host disks of dusty debris. However, these debris disks only appear 10-20 millions of years following the star’s violent Red Giant phase. A new ...

Dead stars known as white dwarfs, have a mass like the sun while being similar in size to Earth. They are common in our galaxy, as 97% of stars will eventually become white dwarfs. As stars reach the ...

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young solar system started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their ...

In exoplanetary science, white dwarfs are usually only an afterthought. Most extrasolar planet hunters are too busy looking for an Earth 2.0 to give these hyper-dense stellar remnants much ...

Astronomers have discovered four previously unseen white dwarfs concealed in nearby binary star systems, revealing that even ...

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you'll likely learn that they are 'dead stars' that continuously cool down over time. Astronomers are challenging this theory after ...

Astronomers have captured their second-ever glimpse into a rare celestial object: a white dwarf pulsar. Pulsars are typically envisioned as spinning neutron stars — a type of stellar remnant left by ...

In a paper published today in Nature, scholars from the Institute for Advanced Study; the University of Victoria, Canada; and the University of Warwick, U.K., have proposed a new theory that explains ...

Four white dwarfs have been sitting next door in astronomical terms, yet brighter stellar companions kept them out of sight.

Planetesimal orbits around a white dwarf. Initially, every planetesimal has a circular, prograde orbit. The kick forms an eccentric debris disk which with prograde (blue) and retrograde orbits (orange ...