Weird star was born when two white dwarfs merged instead of blowing up

[Judi Lynn]

SPACE 2 March 2020
By Yaz Ashmawi



When stars collide
University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

A bizarre white dwarf is probably the result of a dramatic merger between two ancient stars.

White dwarfs are the small, dense, hot cores of average-mass stars just like our sun after they have burnt through their fuel and shed their outer layers. These faint stellar embers slowly cool.

These dwarfs are common throughout the universe, but now Mark Hollands at the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues have discovered a specimen 150 light years from Earth with some very peculiar characteristics.

It has a mass about double the average for a white dwarf, and it also appears to be moving through the Milky Way extremely quickly — faster than 99 per cent of its neighbours.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235871-weird-star-was-born-when-two-white-dwarfs-merged-instead-of-blowing-up/#ixzz6FbaGZDjA