Hubble Find Surprises Astronomers: White Dwarfs Can Still Undergo Stable Thermonuclear Activity

Could dying stars hold the secret to looking younger? New evidence from the NASAEstablished in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.””>NASA/ESA Hubble Space TelescopeThe Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as Hubble or HST) is one of NASA’s Great Observatories and was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990. It is one of the largest and most versatile space telescopes in use and features a 2.4-meter mirror and four main instruments that observe in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was named after astronomer Edwin Hubble.”>Hubble Space Telescope suggests that white dwarfs could continue to burn hydrogen in the final stages of their lives, causing them to appear more youthful than they actually are. This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of star clusters.

The prevalent view of white dwarfs as inert, slowly cooling stars has been challenged by observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. An international group of astronomers have discovered the first evidence that white dwarfs can slow down their rate of aging by burning hydrogen on their surface.

“We have found the first observational evidence that white dwarfs can still undergo stable thermonuclear activity,” explained Jianxing Chen of the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led this research. “This was quite a surprise, as it is at odds with what is commonly believed.”

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White dwarfs are the slowly cooling stars that have cast off their outer layers during the last stages of their lives. They are common objects in the cosmos; roughly 98% of all the stars in the Universe will ultimately end up as white dwarfs, including our own Sun.^[1] Studying these cooling stages helps astronomers understand not only white dwarfs, but also their earlier stages as well.

To investigate the physics underpinning white dwarfA white dwarf star is the remnant of star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel, but it lacks the mass to become a neutron star. A typical white dwarf is only slightly bigger than Earth, yet it is 200,000 times as dense.”>white dwarf evolution, astronomers compared cooling white dwarfs in two massive collections of stars: the globular clusters M3 and M13.^[2] These two clusters share many physical properties such as age and metallicity^[3] but the populations of stars that will eventually give rise to white dwarfs are different. In particular, the overall color of stars at an evolutionary stage known as the Horizontal Branch are bluer in M13, indicating a population of hotter stars. This makes M3 and M13 together a perfect natural laboratory in which to test how different populations of white dwarfs cool.

This image shows a wide-field view of M13. Credit: ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: D. De Martin

“The superb quality of our Hubble observations provided us with a full view of the stellar populations of the two globular clusters,” continued Chen. “This allowed us to really contrast how stars evolve in M3 and M13.”

Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 the team observed M3 and M13 at near-ultraviolet wavelengths, allowing them to compare more than 700 white dwarfs in the two clusters. They found that M3 contains standard white dwarfs which are simply cooling stellar cores. M13, on the other hand, contains two populations of white dwarfs: standard white dwarfs and those which have managed to hold on to an outer envelope of hydrogen, allowing them to burn for longer and hence cool more slowly.

Comparing their results with computer simulations of stellar evolution in M13, the researchers were able to show that roughly 70% of the white dwarfs in M13 are burning hydrogen on their surfaces, slowing down the rate at which they are cooling.

This image shows a wide-field view of M3. Credit: ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: D. De Martin

This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of stars in the Milky WayThe Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Earth, and is named for its appearance from Earth. It is a barred spiral galaxy that contains an estimated 100-400 billion stars and has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years.”>Milky Way. The evolution of white dwarfs has previously been modeled as a predictable cooling process. This relatively straightforward relationship between age and temperature has led astronomers to use the white dwarf cooling rate as a natural clock to determine the ages of star clusters, particularly globular and open clusters. However, white dwarfs burning hydrogen could cause these age estimates to be inaccurate by as much as 1 billion years.

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“Our discovery challenges the definition of white dwarfs as we consider a new perspective on the way in which stars get old,” added Francesco Ferraro of the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who coordinated the study. “We are now investigating other clusters similar to M13 to further constrain the conditions which drive stars to maintain the thin hydrogen envelope which allows them to age slowly.”

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Notes

1. The Sun is only 4.6 billion years through its roughly 10-billion-year lifetime. Once it exhausts hydrogen in its core, the Sun will swell into a red giant, engulfing the inner planets and searing the Earth’s surface. It will then throw off its outer layers, and the exposed core of the Sun will be left as a slowly cooling white dwarf. This stellar ember will be incredibly dense, packing a large fraction of the mass of the Sun into a roughly Earth-sized sphere.
2. M3 contains roughly half a million stars and lies in the constellation Canes Venatici. M13 — occasionally known as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules — contains slightly fewer stars, only several hundred thousand. White dwarfs are often used to estimate the ages of globular clusters, and so a significant amount of Hubble time has been dedicated to exploring white dwarfs in old and densely populated globular clusters. Hubble directly observed white dwarfs in globular star clusters for the first time in 2006.
3. Astronomers use the word “metallicity” to describe the proportion of a star which is composed of elements other than hydrogen and helium. The vast majority of matter in the Universe is either hydrogen or helium — to take the Sun as an example, 74.9% of its mass is hydrogen, 23.8% is helium, and the remaining 1.3% is a mixture of all the other elements, which astronomers refer to as “metals.”

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More information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of Jianxing Chen (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory Bologna), Francesco R. Ferraro (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory Bologna), Mario Cadelano (Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory Bologna), Maurizio Salaris (Liverpool John Moores University), Barbara Lanzoni (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory Bologna), Cristina Pallanca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory Bologna), Leandro G. Althaus (Universidad Nacional de La Plata and CCT – CONICET Centro Cientifico Tecnologico La Plata), and Emanuele Dalessandro (Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory Bologna).