Hot Star Found

Caption: White dwarfs in the globular cluster M4. In this picture, only the faintest stars are white dwarfs. (Image credit: NASA and H. Richer, University of British Columbia)

A hot andaging star exhibits something never seen before. Sounds like a lurid Hollywood tale, but the discovery is a cosmic one.

Astronomershave found a white dwarf star with a surface temperature of 359,500 degreesFahrenheit (200,000 Celsius). It's so hot that "its photosphere exhibits emission lines in the ultravioletspectrum, a phenomenon that has never been seen before," the researcherssaid in a statement today.

Thefinding, from observations by NASA's space-based Far-Ultraviolet SpectroscopicExplorer (FUSE), will be detailed in the journal Astronomy &Astrophysics.

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