Astronomers Find Four White Dwarfs Nearby
Astronomers have identified four previously hidden white dwarf stars orbiting red dwarf companions within 65 light-years of Earth. The discovery was made using ultraviolet data from the Hubble Space Telescope after traditional visible light observations failed to detect them.
Why it matters
This discovery refines our understanding of the local stellar neighborhood and demonstrates the importance of multi-wavelength astronomical surveys.
Researchers at University of Warwick and University of Colorado Boulder have directly observed, for the first time, four white dwarfs stars orbiting in double star systems in our nearby region of space. These stellar binaries are all located within 65 light-years of Earth, and one of them is the ninth closest white dwarf to our Sun.
The four systems all have red dwarf star companions, larger and brighter stars, making it look like these were single star systems. The new results, published in MNRAS , have identified that each of these nearby red dwarfs stars were hosting a hidden white dwarf companion star.
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