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12 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 11, 2026.
The 'hypersoft X-ray sources,' spotted in the Andromeda and Pinwheel galaxies and four ellipticals, pour out extreme ultraviolet light and may be the long-sought stars that become Type Ia supernovae. The paper is in Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers measured the gravitational redshift of SDSS J0608−0059 and found it sits on the wrong mass-radius curve for an ordinary white dwarf — evidence it came from a single massive star, not a merger.
Physicists used laser cooling and strong magnetic fields to push an ultracold neutral plasma into territory no model covers, where free electrons, loosely bound atoms and deeply bound atoms all coexist and interact in ways nobody predicted.
A team led by SUNY Poly and the Kavli IPMU finds that a primordial black hole passing through a white dwarf could tidally heat it into a thermonuclear runaway — and that the resulting explosions would leave a distinctive chemical signature already visible in the Milky Way.
A Caltech astrophysicist calculates that lopsided eruptions from bloated, dying sun-like stars act like thousands of tiny rocket thrusts, nudging the stars to speeds of about a kilometer per second.
Astronomers at Warwick and Colorado used Hubble's ultraviolet vision to pull four dead stars out of the glare of brighter companions — one just 25 light-years away, now the ninth-closest white dwarf to the Sun.
An astronomer argues that red dwarfs and white dwarfs are the best places to catch an alien megastructure, if one exists, by its telltale infrared afterglow.
A strange radio pulse arriving every two hours has been traced to a white dwarf and a red dwarf locked in a tight orbit, their colliding magnetic fields firing the beat across space.
An extraordinarily bright X-ray flare could be the first direct evidence of a long-sought intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart and devouring a dead star.
Using Australia's ASKAP telescope, a team traced a baffling repeating signal to a white dwarf devouring its companion star — emitting bursts every 1.4 hours that are 100 times more powerful than any seen before.
Japan's XRISM telescope reveals hidden white dwarf companion pulling material and generating temperatures above 100 million degrees.
XRISM space observatory reveals hidden white dwarf companion pulling material from Gamma Cassiopeiae, finally explaining the star's puzzling high-energy emissions that have baffled scientists since 1976.