white dwarf

“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s.

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Good news for astrophysicists and fans of massive thermonuclear explosions alike: a team of mathematicians at the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working alongside two astrophysicists from Stony Brook University and U.C. Santa Cruz, have modeled the hours leading up to a Type Ia supernova, capturing the gritty details of the cataclysmic death of a white dwarf star for the first time.

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