All of our science is limited to a level , so it often materialise that we run into " impossible " objects and events that go beyond what we know about the universe . KIC 8145411 is one of these . The breakthrough of the tiny white midget that can not be easy explicate is report inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters .
A clean dwarf is the concluding phase of the lifecycle of average and minor stars . Red giant , dying stars that have burned all their hydrogen fuel , sometimes drum out their outer layers , leave behind a dead thick core that we call a white dwarf . Ninety - seven percentage of star in the Milky Way are destined to become one .
Typical white gnome are around 60 pct of the batch of the Sun . KIC 8145411 is just 20 percent . This is not in itself strange , we have seen smaller . But for such a humble white nanus to form , it would have to have had a very modest primogenitor star . The problem with this is modest stars are very long - lived and take much longer to evolve . The original star would have to be old than the universe to have race out of fuel and blown out its material to end up with such a whitened nanus .
There is another fashion for ashen dwarfs to lose their layer and become dense effect . If they have a companion , it might slip the layers and discover the core more quickly . KIC 8145411 does have a fellow traveller , but this account does n’t work for this scenario . KIC 8145411 is 195 million kilometers ( 119 million miles ) from its Sun - sized companion , 10 time too far for in effect aggregative transfer between the stars .
The researchers have proposed several explanations for the evolution of this blanched dwarf . There could have been a third star that slip the mass and then was ejected by the system of rules . There might have been a great major planet or a brown dwarf ( object too large to be planet but too little to be stars ) that siphoned the gas layer , before being destruct by the companion star . Or the whitened gnome had some special properties that allowed it to stretch out its envelope all the way to its companion . The team points out , however , that all these explanations are unsatisfactory .
So while we still may not recognize exactly how a organization like this forms , uranologist expect to have a better melodic theme when more low - wad white nanus like this are find . The system was discovered in data from Kepler , the now - defunct planet - hunt planet , which uranologist are still going through . It is a ego - lensing organisation , meaning as the white dwarf passes in front of the companion , it gravitationally flex the light . It ’s one of only five known self - lensing binary scheme .
There was only a 1 in 200 opportunity for such a system to have the right geometry to be detected by Kepler , so the researcher are positive that with newer telescopes , there are more white dwarf like this to be chance upon out there .
[ H / T : AAS NOVA ]
