Tuesday July 11th 2023 – 7:00pm
Sirius B and the discovery of white dwarfs
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, and the seventh-nearest stellar system, at a distance of 8.6 light years. Periodic motions were discovered 180 years ago, which led to the discovery of a faint companion, Sirius B. This finding established the existence of white dwarfs as a new class of stars with low luminosities but relatively hot temperatures. Thanks to the space mission Gaia, we now know of hundreds of thousands of white dwarfs, which are the remains of average-sized stars similar to our Sun. Once these stars have burnt all their nuclear fuel, they shed their outer layers, leaving behind a hot stellar core that cools down as a white dwarf. The team of Prof Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay at the University of Warwick recently discovered that these white dwarfs become solid crystals as they cool. The heat released during this solidification process, which lasts several billion years, slows down their cooling process.
More than 95 per cent of all stellar objects will become crystallised white dwarfs. This stable form of matter will be the dominant phase of the universe, for several billion times the current age of the universe!
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Awesome talk… gives me something to go research and learn more about!