WHAT ARE WHITE DWARFS?

Humans can survive in this universe as long as we have energy source. Unfortunately, the universe will die. It will happen slowly, over many billions of years, but it will happen. On a universal time scale, stars like our sun will be gone in no time. Luckily, there are places that will exist practically forever from human perspective, the corpses of dead stars......which are WHITE DWARFS.

They could be humanity's last home right before the death of the universe.

What are these strange things and what happens when they finally die?

How long stars live varies drastically, depending on how massive they are. For example, really massive stars burn hot and fast, dying violently in supernova a few million years after birth. But they're the exception. 97% of all stars will end their existence as white dwarfs.

There are two ways this can happen:

1) Small stars - so called red dwarfs - burn out over trillions of years until they eventually quietly turn into white dwarfs. 

2) Medium sized stars like our sun are more interesting. Imagine the sun as a huge pressure cooker that fuses hyfrogen into helium in its core through its gravity. The fusion of elements releases extreme amounts of energy, that pushes outwards and stabilizes the star, keeping it in a delicate balance. When the sun is old, the hydrogen in the core is exhausted, and the sun will begin to burn helium into heavier elements.

                                 Which doing so, it will shed its outer layers. When this process is over more than half of the sun's mass will be lost into space as a spectacular planetary nebula millions of kilometers across. What remains will be its former core and a White dwarf is born, a star corpse. While its former self was about 100 times its diameter, now it's only about as big as earth, but still with about half of its former mass. This means it's extremely dense, a teaspoon of white dwarf is about as massive as a car. Its surface gravity is over 100,000 times higher than Earth's.

If you tried to land on it, you would immediately be compressed into a steaming puddle. Life around a white dwarf is very unlikely, but possible. Most of them that exist now were former stars that, well died, which probably ruined any planets that once had. But that's not all, since they are so small, a planet would need to orbit them about 75 times closer than earth is to the sun to have liquid water. This proximity has ups and downs. For one, it would tidally lock the planet giving it a permanent day and permanent night. At the edges of these day and night zones  life could be possible. But white dwarfs have a very stable energy output, so they might actually safer to live around than many red dwarfs. 

This is still a speculation at this point, but if we could find the white dwarf with the right conditions to settle around, we could have a home for many billion of years.

Source: https://www.voicetube.com/videos/51806

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