admin Scientists have discovered a star that is in the process of crystallizing into a celestial diamond.
This star is a white dwarf. A sun-like star’s deflated shell that burned most of its fuel before collapsing. For stars whose cores are primarily composed of metallic oxygen and carbon, the cooling process that follows the collapse into a white dwarf will eventually crystallize the star into a giant diamond. But the process is so slow that researchers don’t believe that any star in the universe actually turned into a gigantic glowing ball. Scientists estimate that such a transition would take 1000 trillion years, yet the universe is only 13.6 billion years old. (1 quintillion is 1,000 trillion, and 1 trillion is 100 billion.)
But researchers now believe they have found a star in the early stages of this transition. The star, designated HD 190412 C, lies about 104 light-years away in the quadruple star system called HD 190412. The researchers calculated the star’s temperature to be about 11,420 degrees Fahrenheit (6,300 degrees Celsius), entering the region of crystallization: White dwarf. Since there are other stars in the system that have not yet collapsed into white dwarf states, researchers can use the composition of these still-burning stars to determine how much metal is in the cores of white dwarfs. I was able to determine what was included. They also calculated the star’s age to be about 4.2 billion years.
Knowing the exact distance from Earth to the star system is also important for calculations. That distance affects the brightness of the light emitted by the fading white dwarf. The researchers used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which aims to create a 3D map of the one billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Using this information, the research team modeled the cooling of white dwarfs over time, confirming the first case of a white dwarf crystallizing at a known age. Because other star systems similar to HD 190412 exist, including one that is home to the bright star Sirius, the researchers say there may be other white dwarfs crystallizing in cosmic neighborhoods. reporting.
This result was published in his arXiv preprint database on 5 June and accepted for publication in the Royal Astronomical Society’s monthly notices.
Originally published on LiveScience.com
