Phobos
Oct6-04, 09:46 AM
Any suggestions?
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/10/05/space.star.reut/index.html
...smaller of two stars gave so much to its larger companion that it reached a dead end, and scientists ...haven't seen anything like it.
Doomed to orbit its more energetic partner for millions of years, the burned-out star has lost so much mass that it can no longer sustain nuclear fusion at its core and has become a new, indeterminate stellar object...
"Now the donor star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star...There's no true category for an object in such limbo."
The binary system EF Eridanus is made up of a recipient, a faint white dwarf star -- a sunlike star that has progressed to the final phase of its life -- and the donor object, which has about one-twentieth of our sun's mass.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/10/05/space.star.reut/index.html
...smaller of two stars gave so much to its larger companion that it reached a dead end, and scientists ...haven't seen anything like it.
Doomed to orbit its more energetic partner for millions of years, the burned-out star has lost so much mass that it can no longer sustain nuclear fusion at its core and has become a new, indeterminate stellar object...
"Now the donor star has reached a dead end -- it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star...There's no true category for an object in such limbo."
The binary system EF Eridanus is made up of a recipient, a faint white dwarf star -- a sunlike star that has progressed to the final phase of its life -- and the donor object, which has about one-twentieth of our sun's mass.