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‘Dwarfquakes’ Reveal the Future of Our Universe
Dying stars were an enigma—until an astronomer measured seismic shifts on them, giving us clues about the sun’s future and the expansion rate of the universe.
For The Daily Beast:
White dwarfs—the hot, burned-out remains of ordinary stars—are very common in the universe, and weird. (Our very own sun will become a white dwarf in a few billion years, too.) Imagine something the size of Earth, but 300,000 times more massive, glowing white-hot and bright enough to be seen far away despite its tiny size.
“It’s just a pixel of light,” Noemi Giammichele, an astronomer at the University of Toulouse, told The Daily Beast. “I find it really amazing all the information we can gather just from that one tiny dot.”
Made of pure carbon and oxygen, with only a thin haze of other atoms acting as its atmosphere, white dwarfs certainly aren’t like anything we can make in a lab on Earth. But Giammichele used seismology to measure “dwarfquakes” to not only understand the internal structure of these white dwarfs but also the future expansion rate of our universe.
