Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf star – the surviving core of a burned-out sunlike star. Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent of the mass of our Sun. This agrees with earlier
star – the surviving core of a burned-out sunlike star.
The results are reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The lead author is Peter McGill, formerly of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and now based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The collapsed remains of a star that burned out 1 billion years ago, LAWD 37 has been extensively studied because it is only 15 light-years away in the constellation Musca. “Because this white dwarf is relatively close to us, we’ve got lots of data on it — we’ve got information about its spectrum of light, but the missing piece of the puzzle has been a measurement of its mass,” said McGill., which makes extraordinarily precise measurements of nearly two billion star positions.
Since the light from the background star was so faint, the main challenge for astronomers was extracting its image from the glare of the white dwarf, which is 400 times brighter than the background star. Only Hubble can make these kinds of high-contrast observations in visible light.The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the center of this Hubble Space Telescope image.
The white dwarf has a ‘spike’ because it is so bright that the light ‘bled’ into the Hubble camera’s CCD detector. This interfered with one of the observing dates for measuring that background star’s position on the sky.
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