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.
A Stellar Duet and the Gravitational Ripples of Spacetime
Astronomers have discovered a close pair of stars whose orbital dance is speeding up year after year. These are white dwarfs — superdense, cooled remnants of stars, roughly the size of Earth, where matter is compressed to a degenerate state.