Table of Contents
Fastest Spinning White Dwarf
Lets Deconstruct
- Life of a Star?
- White Dwarf?
- Black Dwarf?
- Chandrashekhar Limit?
Fastest Spinning White Dwarf
Fastest Spinning White Dwarf
- What is White Dwarf?
- White dwarfs are stars that have burned up all of the hydrogen they once used as nuclear fuel.
- White dwarfs have very high density and very high surface gravity.
- Recently, a team of astronomers has confirmed the fastest spinning white dwarf (named J0240+1952) that completes a full rotation once every 25 seconds.
Black Dwarf
- A black dwarf is a theoretical stellar remnant, specifically a white dwarf that has cooled sufficiently that it no longer emit significant heat or light.
- Do any Black Dwarfs exists?
- .!!
- Because the time required for a white dwarf to reach this state is calculated to be longer than the current age of the universe (13.77 billion years), no black dwarfs are expected to exist in the universe so far.
Chandrashekhar Limit
- Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar
- Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist who spent his professional life in the United States.
- He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for “theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars”.
- Chnadrashakhar’s mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes. The Chandrasekhar limit is named after him.
DART Mission
DART Mission
- NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) was launched successfully from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on November 24, 2021.
- It went up aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. DART is NASA’s first planetary defense test mission. Its goal is to strike a small asteroid and minutely change its orbit.
- DART’s target asteroid is a moonlet of a larger asteroid called Didymos which is 780 m in diameter. Its companion, Didymos B or Dimorphos is 160 m in diameter which is primary target.
- DART will arrive at its target asteroid in late 2022 with a impact.
DART Mission
- The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid.
- DART would be NASA’s first mission to demonstrate what’s known as the kinetic impactor technique, striking the asteroid to shift its orbit – to defend against a potential future asteroid impact.
FYI
Mission Lucy
Mission Lucy
Mission Lucy
Psyche Mission
Psyche Mission
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