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.
The Mystery of White Dwarfs with a Long Delay
An old star like the Sun, at the end of its life, shrinks into a white dwarf — a dense sphere about the size of Earth. After that, it simply cools down, like embers in a campfire. But some white dwarfs somehow stay hot for billions of years. Astronomers studied such objects within a radius of one hundred parsecs from us and found an unexpected pattern.
Star Flared Up 17% in Half a Day
A pendulum swings on its own, but sometimes it suddenly starts swinging so violently that it nearly breaks free from its mount. That's roughly how the white dwarf GD 1212 behaves — a star the size of Earth but with a mass almost like the Sun's.