Evidence Of a White Dwarf Turning Into a Huge Crystal

how wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing a somewhat intriguing discovery of a very unusual white dwarf that seems to show direct evidence for what the scientists referred to as white dwarf crystallization or essentially signs that this particular white dwarf is slowly turning into a massive Crystal and because it contains a lot of carbon on the inside and the past press

has actually compared this to a massive Diamond possibly similar to what you see right here but that's of course just an artistic or even symbolic interpretation in reality crystallization inside these white dwarfs is a much more complex process and so in this video Let's actually discuss a little bit more about this particular Discovery how all of this was discovered and what this means for astronomy but

it's important to start with a bit of an overview especially because our sun Monday is most likely going to become something similar so today we know that stars that are less than 8 solar masses in mass will not go supernova and instead will end up expanding in the watch produce what's known as planetary nebula the concept that you can learn more about in one of the

videos in the description and right in the middle as you can see from this image leave behind a white dwarf that's actually responsible for the ionization of the gas that creates these beautiful formations and it just so happens that one of the closest stars to us Sirius contains one of the more interesting white dwarfs that you can see right there we've discussed the system and what

the science has discovered here in one of the videos you can find in the description but I guess here the question is so what exactly is a white dwarf I mean in a natural Anton explain it to milacan 5. well it's basically a core Remnant from a star that lost its outer shell but because this is a stellar core it's also extremely dense and contains a

lot of material inside that's been squished by everything that used to exist above it but it's a core that does not produce any more energy and all of this extra pressure and extra density creates conditions where electrons start to create their own sort of ocean but because electrons are particles that are not allowed to be in the same state in the same amount of space they

create a kind of a external pressure that we refer to as electron degeneracy this prevents the white dwarf from collapsing even further and basically maintains its shape and its mass up until it reaches a cannibal limit this limit is usually around 1.4 solar masses and is referred to as Chandra Zucker limit when that limit is reached that's when the star can no longer sustain itself and

basically explodes in what's known as type 1A Supernova the Supernova that usually produce around the same amount of energy because they always explode around the same mass which is often why they're used as a kind of a distance candle to measure distances to various far away galaxies but they have to get that math from somewhere and usually they basically steal it from one of their Partners

but this doesn't always happen and sometimes the white Wharf is really far away from the partner kind of like in the system of Sirius in which case that white dwarf is going to age and change its properties because it's essentially cooling down over time and so even though it starts extremely hot because it used to be a core of a star and it actually starts really

hot producing a lot of very bright white and blue light over time it cools down slowly becoming reddish and eventually it's supposed to turn black and so the ultimate fate for all white works and essentially All Stars like our sun is to become some kind of a black dwarf producing no more light but that takes a really long time possibly trillions and more likely quadrillions of

years the universe is only 14 billion years old so today nobody expects to find any of these black dwarfs simply because the universe is relatively young fine in a black dwarf would be a huge deal and would most likely disprove a lot of modern cosmology but because we haven't found any black dwarfs anywhere at the moment it basically suggests that big bang most likely happens and

overall the age of white dwarfs seems to actually imply that we have the Indian of the universe calculate it more or less correct but the main point is that these stars do evolve over time and part of this Evolution involves the process of crystallization when some of the ions inside the white dwarf start to freeze and acquire a kind of a crystallized pattern but as white

dwarfs crystallize they also release a little bit of energy which basically implies that they can actually maintain their temperatures just a little bit longer and so all this unusual electron Ocean on the inside starts to assume a kind of a prominent shape with all of the complex elements inside eventually crystallizing into one single massive object but the obvious question is is it actually a diamond the

answer here is well not really mostly because damage which is of course carbon have a much much lower density here we're talking about density that's like possibly thousand times lower whereas White Horse very likely contain a very different type of carbon that most likely has very different properties that we can't even imagine but that is interestingly this process of crystallization does not seem to take as

long as turning into an actual black dwarf because it looks like we've discovered at least one star out there that definitely shows signs that is being crystallized from the inside a star system that we used to think contains three stars this is a star system known as hd190412 but that seems to contain another object that we've discovered very recently with the help of the iconic is

a sky telescope and more important the telescope also allowed the scientists to extremely accurately determine the orbits and also determine the age of the system with the system appearing to be pretty old the three stars orbit in here appear to be about 7.3 billion years old but the fourth star the white dwarf appears to be only 4.2 billion years old and so there's actually an almost

4 billion year discrepancy and though it's obviously possible the white dwarf came from somewhere else based on the observed orbits and just based on the fact that it's very unlikely the scientists believe that all of these stars were very likely formed around the same time and the fact that the white dwarf appears much younger implies one thing it actually implies that it produces way more heat

than it should with the heat extremely likely been produced by the process of crystallization or essentially as the carbon and oxygen atoms inside this white dwarf stop moving around and start forming crystallized forms they actually slowly release energy that heats up the white dwarf even more allowing it to release just a little bit more heat than usual and all of this is visible as a very

specific color signature coming from the white dwarf something that has been theoretically predicted before but something that has never been observed as a matter of factors even if people are predicting all this back in the 60s you can find that paper in the description below and so crystallization inside this white dwarf is really the only way the scientists can explain a huge discrepancy in the age

of these stars but I guess more importantly the fact that this particular Stars system is so close to us and the fact that it's already crystallizing producing the cooling delays as predicted by various models in place that these objects must be really common or in other words crystallizing wires probably exist all over the place it's just this one is the first we've discovered so far but

here the scientists have also discovered a bit of a discrepancy specifically a little bit more heat than predicted they don't exactly know why this is happening but they believe it's possibly because of the Isotopes of neon located inside the core of the white dwarf with the isotope potentially producing a little bit more heat and thus delaying the cooling even more in other words the scientists did

not actually expect to discover so much heating or so much delayed cooling with the crystallization process being extremely efficient and potentially producing way more energy than x factors but because of the similarity to the famous series system the scientists now believe this is a pretty common phenomenon so definitely a pretty exciting Discovery or a pretty exciting confirmation that crystallization does occur in white dwarfs after all

you can find in the description stay one and 4C tomorrow and as always bye [Music] thank you [Music] hello everyone foreign