Four dead stars have been confirmed within 65 light-years of Earth, hidden for decades in the glare of the brighter red dwarfs they orbit

Astronomers used Hubble's ultraviolet vision to directly confirm four white dwarfs lost in the glare of nearby red dwarfs, one of them the ninth closest to the Sun.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Editorial process

Four white dwarfs, the burned-out cores left when Sun-like stars die, have been directly confirmed for the first time in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood, each one lost in the glare of a red dwarf it orbits. All four lie within 20 parsecs, about 65 light-years, and it took ultraviolet observations from the Hubble Space Telescope to separate each faint remnant from the brighter star drowning it out. A team led by the University of Warwick and the University of Colorado Boulder reported the detections in a study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . One of the four turns out to be the ninth closest white dwarf to the Sun.