https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have performed infrared observations of a planetary debris disk around a nearby white dwarf known as GD 362. Results of the new observations, presented October 8 on the arXiv preprint server, yield important insights into the chemical composition of this disk. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-webb-composition-planetary-debris-nearby.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 16 Oct 2025 08:00:02 EDT news679808033 In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, we usually look for planets orbiting sun-like stars and icy moons. But there is another possible candidate—planets circling white dwarfs, the hot, dense remnants of dead stars. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-general-life-planets-orbiting-white.html Astrobiology Tue, 07 Oct 2025 09:30:01 EDT news679047972 University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-icy-planetesimal-high-nitrogen-content.html Astrobiology Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:30:01 EDT news677752155 University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered compelling evidence that a nearby white dwarf is in fact the remnant of two stars merging—a rare stellar discovery revealed through Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet observations of carbon in the star's hot atmosphere. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-ultraviolet-uncovers-evidence-rare-white.html Astronomy Wed, 06 Aug 2025 05:00:11 EDT news673598430 Florida Tech's Caldon Whyte is two years into a lengthy universe exploration to earn his Ph.D. in space sciences. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in astrobiology in 2023, he's fascinated by white dwarf stars—the cooling remnants of low-mass stars (e.g., our sun) that have exhausted their nuclear fuel source—and the likelihood of life surviving in their orbits. https://phys.org/news/2025-03-exploring-likelihood-life-white-dwarf.html Astrobiology Tue, 18 Mar 2025 09:58:04 EDT news661510681 Using various X-ray space observatories, astronomers from Columbia University in New York and elsewhere have investigated CTCV J2056–3014—an intermediate polar containing one of the fastest-spinning white dwarfs. Results of the study, published September 26 on the pre-print server arXiv, shed more light on the nature of this object. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-astronomers-nature-fast-intermediate-polar.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Oct 2024 09:12:13 EDT news647511127 Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have performed spectrophotometric observations of an eclipsing white dwarf–brown dwarf binary known as WD1032+011. Results of their observational campaign, published September 10 on the preprint server arXiv, yield important information regarding the nature of this system. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-crucial-insights-nature-white-dwarfbrown.html Astronomy Thu, 19 Sep 2024 08:50:01 EDT news645803335 NASA wants to come up with an out-of-this-world way to keep track of time, putting the moon on its own souped-up clock. https://phys.org/news/2024-04-nasa-clock-moon-seconds-faster.html Space Exploration Wed, 03 Apr 2024 04:18:20 EDT news631336693 Astronomers using simulated data have produced a glimpse of the sky as it would appear in gravitational waves, cosmic ripples in space-time generated by orbiting objects. The image shows how space-based gravitational wave observatories expected to launch in the next decade will enhance our understanding of our galactic home. https://phys.org/news/2023-09-nasa-team-simulates-glimpse-galaxy.html Astronomy Wed, 20 Sep 2023 17:11:52 EDT news614448703 A group of space scientists from the University of Southern Queensland, the University of Victoria, the University of Warwick and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research discovered a white dwarf star that appears to be in the beginning stages of crystallizing into a celestial diamond. https://phys.org/news/2023-06-white-dwarf-journey-crystallizing-celestial.html Astronomy Mon, 12 Jun 2023 10:19:04 EDT news605783938 Astronomers have directly measured the mass of a dead star using an effect known as gravitational microlensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, and first observed by two Cambridge astronomers 100 years ago. https://phys.org/news/2023-02-astronomers-isolated-white-dwarf.html Astronomy Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:08:41 EST news594551318 While astronomers have seen the debris from scores of exploded stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, it is often difficult to determine the timeline of the star's demise. By studying the spectacular remains of a supernova in a neighboring galaxy using NASA telescopes, a team of astronomers has found enough clues to help wind back the clock. https://phys.org/news/2022-09-astronomers-clock-timeline-stellar-explosion.html Astronomy Mon, 12 Sep 2022 17:30:01 EDT news582221639 Humanity's view of the distant cosmos will never be the same. https://phys.org/news/2022-07-webb-telescope-reveals-deepest-image.html Astronomy Tue, 12 Jul 2022 03:28:08 EDT news576815275 By analyzing the data from the Spektr-RG (SRG) space observatory and from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere have discovered two new polars. The discovery is reported in a paper published June 9 on the arXiv pre-print repository. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-astronomers-polars.html Astronomy Mon, 20 Jun 2022 09:20:01 EDT news574934953 The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind—known as a white dwarf—is sucking in debris from both the system's inner and outer reaches, UCLA astronomers and colleagues report today. https://phys.org/news/2022-06-dead-star-cannibalism-planetary-far-reaching.html Astronomy Thu, 16 Jun 2022 04:06:27 EDT news574571183 Using the 4.1-meter SOAR Telescope in Chile, astronomers have discovered the first example of a binary system where a star in the process of becoming a white dwarf is orbiting a neutron star that has just finished turning into a rapidly spinning pulsar. The pair, originally detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is a "missing link" in the evolution of such binary systems. https://phys.org/news/2022-01-cosmic-spider-source-powerful-gamma-rays.html Astronomy Wed, 12 Jan 2022 15:24:47 EST news561223482 Lightspeed is the fastest velocity in the universe. Except when it isn't. Anyone who's seen a prism split white light into a rainbow has witnessed how material properties can influence the behavior of quantum objects: in this case, the speed at which light propagates. https://phys.org/news/2021-11-scientists-experimentally-reconstruct-bloch-wavefunction.html General Physics Thu, 04 Nov 2021 12:49:18 EDT news555248950 White dwarfs are among the most stable of stars. Left on their own, these stars that have exhausted most of their nuclear fuel—while still typically as massive as the Sun—and shrunk to a relatively small size can last for billions or even trillions of years. https://phys.org/news/2021-10-g3447-stable-star.html Astronomy Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:22:03 EDT news553260114 Eleven billion miles away—more than four times the distance from us to Pluto—lies the boundary of our solar system's magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun's magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible cobweb, fizzles to nothing. Interstellar space begins. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-nasa-rocket-survey-solar-windshield.html Astronomy Fri, 16 Apr 2021 08:42:06 EDT news537781322 A team of researchers from Potsdam University and Kazan Federal University has found evidence of a previously unknown kind of star in nebula IRAS 00500+6713. In their paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the group describes their study of the nebula and its central star and what they believe it represents. https://phys.org/news/2021-01-nebula-iras-central-star.html Astronomy Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:23:13 EST news529147388 The historic NASA Twins Study investigated identical twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly and provided new information on the health effects of spending time in space. https://phys.org/news/2020-11-insights-health-effects-long-duration-space.html Space Exploration Wed, 25 Nov 2020 11:00:09 EST news525506652 When a star unleashes as much energy in a matter of days as our Sun does in several billion years, you know it's not going to remain visible for long. https://phys.org/news/2020-10-hubble-star-oblivion.html Astronomy Thu, 01 Oct 2020 10:50:04 EDT news520768187 When stars like our sun die, all that remains is an exposed core—a white dwarf. A planet orbiting a white dwarf presents a promising opportunity to determine if life can survive the death of its star, according to Cornell University researchers. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-life-survive-star-death-webb.html Astrobiology Wed, 16 Sep 2020 12:23:30 EDT news519477805 An international team of astronomers has conducted spectroscopic and photometric observations of a cataclysmic variable (CV) known as V1460 Her. Results of the study indicate that the system consists of a fast-spinning white dwarf that accretes matter from its evolved companion star. The finding is reported in a paper published August 30 on arXiv.org. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-cataclysmic-variable-v1460-fast-white.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2020 09:00:01 EDT news518770472 An exploding white dwarf star blasted itself out of its orbit with another star in a "partial supernova" and is now hurtling across our galaxy, according to a new study from the University of Warwick. https://phys.org/news/2020-07-blast-star-hurtling-milky.html Astronomy Tue, 14 Jul 2020 19:00:01 EDT news513930636 A team of researchers, led by astrophysicist Sumner Starrfield of Arizona State University, has combined theory with both observations and laboratory studies and determined that a class of stellar explosions, called classical novae, are responsible for most of the lithium in our galaxy and solar system. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-class-stellar-explosions-galactic-lithium.html Astronomy Mon, 01 Jun 2020 14:47:51 EDT news510241661 A nova, or stella nova, the Latin word for "new star," is an explosion on the surface of a star that can produce enough energy to increase the star's brightness by millions of times. Sometimes a nova, which occur in stars called white dwarfs, is so bright it appears as a new star to the naked eye. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-novae-sky.html Astronomy Mon, 13 Apr 2020 11:00:07 EDT news505984093 Boeing safely landed its crew capsule in the New Mexico desert Sunday after an aborted flight to the International Space Station that could hold up the company's effort to launch astronauts for NASA next year. https://phys.org/news/2019-12-boeing-capsule-earth-aborted-space.html Space Exploration Sun, 22 Dec 2019 11:24:11 EST news496236241 Polish astronomers have detected a new ultracompact X-ray binary as part of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The newly found binary, designated OGLE-UCXB-01, is an unusual periodic variable object with a relatively short orbital period. The finding is reported in a paper published August 22 on the arXiv pre-print server. https://phys.org/news/2019-08-astronomers-ultracompact-x-ray-binary-ogle.html Astronomy Wed, 28 Aug 2019 09:00:02 EDT news486194876 In the hunt for life on other worlds, astronomers scour over planets that are light-years away. They need ways to identify life from afar—but what counts as good evidence? https://phys.org/news/2019-08-starlight-life.html Astronomy Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:35:16 EDT news483968106