File:Hubble Observations Used to Measure Mass of Lone White Dwarf Star LAWD 37 (2023-004).png

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English: This graphic shows how microlensing was used to measure the mass of a white dwarf star.

The dwarf, called LAWD 37, is a burned-out star in the center of this Hubble Space Telescope image. Though its nuclear fusion furnace has shut down, trapped heat is sizzling on the surface at 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing the stellar remnant to glow fiercely. The inset box plots how the dwarf passed in front of a background star in 2019. The wavy blue line traces the dwarf's apparent motion across the sky as seen from Earth. Though the dwarf is following a straight trajectory, the motion of Earth orbiting the Sun imparts an apparent sinusoidal offset due to parallax. (The star is only 15 light-years away. Therefore, it is moving at a faster rate against the stellar background.)

As it passed by the fainter background star, the dwarf's gravitation field warped space (as Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted a century ago). And this deflection was precisely measured by Hubble's extraordinary resolution. The amount of deflection yields a mass for the white dwarf of 56 percent our Sun's mass and provides insights into theories of the structure and composition of white dwarfs. This is the first time astronomers directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf star, thanks to a "funhouse mirror" trick of nature.
Date 2 February 2023 (upload date)
Source Hubble Observations Used to Measure Mass of Lone White Dwarf Star LAWD 37
Author SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, Peter McGill (UC Santa Cruz, IoA), Kailash Sahu (STScI) IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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Public domain This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

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