While perhaps everybody knows by now that stars are generally hotter than your morning coffee, here’s another fact that we all should be aware of: some stars are hotter than others. Some of these celestial objects even reach staggeringly high temperatures of roughly 100,000 degrees Celsius at their surface. Our Sun, by comparison, is nowhere near such a number.
Gathering data by harnessing the powers of the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), astronomers discovered a new batch of stars that can be qualified as ‘super hot,’ meaning that the cosmic objects can reach exactly that kind of temperature mentioned above.
The highest temperature of the newfound stars: 180,000 degrees Celsius
The newfound stars qualify as a white dwarf and pre-white dwarf stars that are very hot, with the hottest having a surface temperature of 180,000 degrees Celsius.
The stars in question are nearing the end of their life cycles and are evolving into white dwarfs. One of these stars is located at the center of a recently discovered planetary nebula that measures one light-year in diameter. Two of the other stars are classified as “variable” or pulsating stars. All of these stars are in the advanced stages of their life cycles and are not too far away from the end of their existence.
Simon Jeffery from the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, who is also the leader of the new research, stated:
Stars with effective temperatures of 100,000 degrees Celsius or higher are incredibly rare. It was a real surprise to find so many of these stars in our survey. These discoveries will help to increase our understanding of the late stages of stellar evolution and they demonstrate that SALT is a fantastic telescope for our project.
The surface temperature of the Sun is about 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,932 degrees Fahrenheit). However, the temperature gets much hotter as you go deeper into the Sun’s interior. The core of the Sun, where nuclear fusion occurs, has a temperature of about 27 million degrees Celsius (48 million degrees Fahrenheit).
The new research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
