White dwarf

node · earth · Galactic

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.