White dwarf

Assembled from 31 blocks · 2 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. The exposed, cooling core left when a star of up to roughly eight solar masses has shed its envelope. It is typically comparable in mass to the Sun and comparable in size to the Earth, held up not by heat but by electron degeneracy pressure, and it therefore cannot contract as it cools. A white dwarf produces no new energy: it radiates away its residual heat over timescales far longer than the present age of the universe. Its mass is bounded above by the Chandrasekhar limit near 1.4 solar masses. A directly measured initial-to-final mass relation spans progenitors from 0.85 to 7.5 solar masses and is markedly non-linear, so the mapping from birth mass to remnant mass is an empirical result rather than a simple proportionality. Not a place on Earth.
3. Knowledge
4. Degeneracy pressure
5. Chandrasekhar limit
6. Red giant and asymptotic giant branch
7. White dwarf
8. Connections
9. Chandrasekhar limit
10. Degeneracy pressure
11. Red giant and asymptotic giant branch
12. Sirius B
13. Alvan Graham Clark sees Sirius B
14. A maximum mass for ideal white dwarfs is published
15. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
16. Degeneracy pressure
17. White dwarf
18. A maximum mass for ideal white dwarfs is published
19. Chandrasekhar limit
20. White dwarf
21. Neutron star
22. A maximum mass for ideal white dwarfs is published
23. A radius is measured for the heaviest known neutron star
24. Main sequence (core hydrogen burning)
25. Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis)
26. Planetary nebula
27. White dwarf
28. Betelgeuse fades by more than a magnitude
29. Evidence
30. Measures the mapping from progenitor mass to white dwarf mass across the stated range and shows it to be markedly non-linear. Journal, volume, article number and arXiv identifier come from ADS and preprint listings via search; the paper was not fetched, and the slope values are not reproduced here.
31. Derives an upper mass bound for a body supported by relativistic electron degeneracy. Journal, volume and pages come from an ADS scan listing seen via search; the paper was not fetched, and the statement that its own derived value was about 0.91 solar masses rests on a secondary summary.