Waspie_Dwarf Posted August 8, 2020 #1 Share Posted August 8, 2020 Johns Hopkins astrophysicists observe long-theorized quantum phenomena A team led by students probes the mass-radius relation of white dwarf stars, observing in their data evidence of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity Quote At the heart of every white dwarf star—the dense stellar object that remains after a star has burned away its fuel reserve of gases as it nears the end of its life cycle—lies a quantum conundrum: as white dwarfs add mass, they shrink in size, until they become so small and tightly compacted that they cannot sustain themselves, collapsing into a neutron star. This puzzling relationship between a white dwarf's mass and size, called the mass-radius relation, was first theorized by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the 1930s. Now, a team of Johns Hopkins astrophysicists has developed a method to observe the phenomenon itself using astronomical data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and a recent dataset released by the Gaia Space Observatory. The combined datasets provided more than 3,000 white dwarfs for the team to study. Read More: Johns Hopkins University 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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