A newly found dying star known as ZTF J190132.9+145808.7 became very popular lately.
It was recently discovered, and though it is extremely massive, it is only a bit larger than our Moon.
The star was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which runs out of California and Hawaii.
According to the object’s intense magnetic field and mass, roughly a billion times as strong as the Sun and approximately 1.35 times its mass, the scientists believe that it came to life due to a white dwarf merger.
Their findings were made public this week in Nature.
White dwarfs (also known as degenerate dwarfs) are the final stage of numerous small and medium-sized stars.
When white dwarfs orbit one another in a binary star system, they eventually merge, and there is a chance that they explode in a supernova.
However, if they are not that massive, they just join forces to form a bigger white dwarf.
Ilaria Caiazzo, an astrophysicist from the California Institute of Technology and the study’s principal author, said:
“We caught this very interesting object that wasn’t quite massive enough to explode. We are truly probing how massive a white dwarf can be.”
The massive dwarf has a very rapid rotation, completing a total revolution in less than seven minutes.
Its diameter was estimated at approximately 2,670 miles, slightly smaller than the formerly smallest white dwarfs known, which both had diameters of approximately 3,100 miles.
Analyzing the strength of the star’s magnetic field in contrast to its rapid rotation let the researchers speculate that the dwarf star came as a merger of two separate stars.
There are still numerous unknown details about the dwarf, but scientists are intensely analyzing it to figure out what’s going on.
