White Dwarf Star with Weird Rings Is Spotted by 'Backyard' Sleuths
By Meghan Bartels 13 hours ago
An artist's depiction of a star known as LSPM J0207+3331, which scientists believe is an old white dwarf surrounded by a dust ring.(Image: © Scott Wiessinger/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Astronomers have spotted a puzzlingly old, dusty white dwarf star, the remains of a star like our own sun, and they think the structure may change their understanding of how white dwarfs influence their environments.
The star, formally known as LSPM J0207+3331, seems to be by far the oldest known white dwarf surrounded by a dusty disk. And if the observations hold up, it will be the first white dwarf scientists know of that sports multiple dust rings within that disk, as their current theory suggests.
"This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales," John Debes, a co-author on the new research and an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in a statement. "Most of the models scientists have created to explain rings around white dwarfs only work well up to around 100 million years, so this star is really challenging our assumptions of how planetary systems evolve."
Finding white dwarfs surrounded by stuff isn't unusual, since these stars are the dense corpses of sunlike stars that have shed their gas. But typically, these former suns end up absorbing the solar system rubble that surrounds them.
More:
https://www.space.com/dust-rings-surround-white-dwarf-star.html
