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Chandra’s 2004 Photo Album
The hottest known white dwarf (H1504+65)
28 Jun 04 - An artist's impression of the young, extremely hot white dwarf star H1504+65, as viewed from a distance similar to that of the Earth from the Sun. International teams of astronomers, studying the leftover remnants of stars like our own Sun, have found a remarkable object where the nuclear reactor that once powered it has only just shut down. This star, the hottest known white dwarf, H1504+65, seems to have been stripped of its entire outer regions during its death throes leaving behind the core that formed its power plant. Scientists from the United Kingdom, Germany and the USA focused two of NASA's space telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), onto H1504+65 to probe its composition and measure its temperature. The data revealed that the stellar surface is extremely hot, 200,000 degrees, and is virtually free of hydrogen and helium, something never before observed in any star. Instead, the surface is composed mainly of carbon and oxygen, the 'ashes' of the fusion of helium in a nuclear reactor. Click to enlarge.
Illustration: Univ. of Leicester
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