Recently astronomers discovered a very unusual example of a white dwarf: one that seems to have one side composed of hydrogen and the other side of helium.
In billions of years’ time, once our sun has used up all its fuel and puffed up to become a red giant before throwing off layers to form a planetary nebula, all that will remain at its heart is a dense core called a white dwarf. This fate will be shared by the large majority of stars in our galaxy, so these burnt-out cores are common, with the mass of the sun squeezed into a space the size of the Earth.
“The surface of the white dwarf completely changes from one side to the other,” said lead researcher Ilaria Caiazzo of Caltech in a statement. “When I show the observations to people, they are blown away.” “Not all, but some white dwarfs transition from being hydrogen- to helium-dominated on their surface,” Caiazzo explained. “We might have possibly caught one such white dwarf in the act.”
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