Cosmic Graveyard: Looking For Life in an Unlikely Place
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the "last hurrah" of a star like our sun, the outer layers of gas being cast off and leaving behind the burned out white dwarf, the ite dot in the center.
That makes them a possible, though seemingly improbable, place to look for habitable planets: a rocky, Earthlike world sufficiently near a white dwarf could actually be balmy and hospitable. And while nobody’s come close to finding a planet around a white dwarf yet, a team of astronomers has taken a big step by finding some telltale rocks — or their remnants, anyway.When a star dies, it leaves a tiny, glowing corpse known as a white dwarf; it’s an ember that retains the mass of a star but crunched down into a volume the size of the Earth. As the name suggests, white dwarfs start out white hot, then cool over tens of billions of years. Since the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, however, all existing white dwarfs have barely begun losing their heat./.../
No comments:
Post a Comment