According to a January 24, 2024 article, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) directly imaged two giant planet candidates orbiting the metal-rich DAZ white dwarfs WD 1202 and WD 2105. 

The JWST’s coronagraphs can directly image exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would be a spot, but scientists can learn a lot about it by studying the spot. This includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, and weather. 

White dwarfs are extremely dense and massive, but only about as large as Earth. They’ve left their life of fusion behind, and emit only residual heat. Astronomers are pretty certain that most stars have planets.

According to a January 25, 2024 paper, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) directly imaged two giant planet candidates orbiting the white dwarfs WD 1202-232 and WD 2105-82. 

The JWST is a space telescope designed for infrared astronomy. It was launched in December 2021 and arrived at its destination in January 2022. The telescope’s high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments allow it to view objects that are too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. 

The giant planets survived the stars’ red giant phases. A white dwarf is the final evolutionary state of stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star or black hole

White dwarfs are the remnants of stars that aren’t massive enough to become black holes or neutron stars. They are very dense, with a mass similar to the Sun but a volume similar to Earth’s. White dwarfs are considered “dead” because they no longer fuse atoms to create energy. However, they still shine because they are so hot. Eventually, they will cool and fade from view

The first white dwarf star was discovered in 1783 by William Herschel. It was called 40 Eridani B and is part of a three-star system

In 1862, the second white dwarf was discovered, but was initially thought to be a red dwarf. It was a small star near the star Sirius. This white dwarf is called Sirius B and forms a binary system with Sirius A, the brightest-appearing star in the sky. 

In 1917, Adriaan van Maanen discovered van Maanen’s Star, an isolated white dwarf. 

White dwarfs are among the dimmest stars in the universe. However, they have been the focus of astronomers since the first white dwarf was observed by optical telescopes in the middle of the 19th century

What is the most famous white dwarf?

The most famous one is the companion to the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, but more particularly all stars known to host exoplanets will also end their lives as white dwarfs

What is the coolest white dwarf star?

This ancient stellar remnant is so cool that its carbon has crystallized, forming, in effect, an Earth-sized diamond in space. This is an artist impression of a white dwarf star in orbit with pulsar PSR J2222-0137. It may be the coolest and dimmest white dwarf ever identified

white dwarf a dying star?

The white dwarf is considered “dead” because atoms inside of it no longer fuse to give the star energy. But it still “shines” because it is so hot. Eventually, it will cool off and fade from view. Our Sun will reach this death about 8 billion years from now

Our Sun is not massive enough to explode as a supernova. Instead, it’ll spend time as a red giant. The red giant phase occurs when a star runs out of hydrogen to feed fusion. It’s a complicated process that astronomers are still working hard to understand. But red giants shed layers of material into space that light up as planetary nebulae. Eventually, the red giant is no more, and only a tiny, yet extraordinarily dense, white dwarf resides in the middle of all the expelled material.

WD 0423+120 is a suspected double degenerate system of white dwarfs. 

White dwarfs are some of the densest forms of matter known, second only to neutron stars, quark stars, and black holes. They are hotter than the sun but have low luminosity because they are so small. Eventually, white dwarfs will cool and turn into black dwarfs. 

Some nearby white dwarf stars can be observed directly through telescopes, though they are extremely faint

Sirius B is the closest known white dwarf to Earth, at a distance of 8.6 light years. It’s the smaller component of the Sirius binary star, and the second white dwarf to be discovered

Sirius B is the brightest known white dwarf star, and is denser than Earth, with a gravitational field 350,000 times stronger. It’s the leftover core of a star like the Sun, after it has shed its outer layers and revealed its dense core. 

A typical white dwarf is half the mass of the Sun, but only slightly larger than Earth. An Earth-sized white dwarf has a density of 1 x 109 kg/m3, which is 200,000 times denser than Earth

White dwarfs are too dim to see with the unaided eye. However, some can be found in binary systems with an easily seen main sequence star. 

White dwarfs are hard to see because they’re generally rather dim, having low luminosity despite very high surface temperatures. This is due to their small sizes, which makes their total surface area tremendously smaller than the Sun. 

Despite their high temperatures, the cores of white dwarfs are not visible directly from Earth. This is because the outer layers of the white dwarf, which are cooler, emit most of the visible light that reaches us. 

In about half of them, the central white dwarf can be seen using a moderate sized telescope. In 2006, Hubble was the first telescope to directly observe white dwarfs in globular star clusters

Some very nearby white dwarf stars can be observed directly through telescopes, though they are extremely faint. M4, shown above, is the nearest globular cluster to the Earth. It contains hundreds of thousands of stars visible with ground-based telescopes, and is expected to contain about 40,000 white dwarfs

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