When stars run out of fuel and come to the end of their lives, the biggest ones explode in huge supernovas. But smaller stars go through a different change in which they throw off portions of their mass, creating a planetary nebula around them and leaving a small, dense core called a white dwarf. Like the majority of stars, our sun will eventually become a white dwarf, glowing with residual heat but no longer producing energy through fusion.
The white dwarf, called G238-44, is the first one that has been observed accreting both rocky-metallic material and icy material, which is important as these are the key components from which planets are formed. Studying this white dwarf could therefore help researchers to learn about how planetary systems form.
And what makes this a “digital trend”?