Flickering Debris: White Dwarf Transits Vanish and Return
Four hours and fifty-eight minutes. With a rhythm like a metronome, something passes in front of the white dwarf ZTF J1944+4557, dimming its light by a third, sometimes almost by half.
Invisible Donors in Binary Stars
In three binary systems, a white dwarf, the dead core of a star, steals gas from its companion. The companion is so dim that it cannot be seen with an ordinary telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope looked at these pairs in infrared light, like a night-vision camera.
A Brown Dwarf That Feeds Its Neighbor
Two faint embers circle each other in the dark so closely that one begins to tear glowing chunks off the other. That is the picture of the system ZTF J1239+8347, caught by the Zwicky Transient Facility telescope.