Chapter 14 Flashcards
What supports white dwarfs against gravity?
Electron degeneracy pressure
White dwarfs are the remaining cores of what?
Dead low mass stars
Isolated White dwarfs _________ and grow dimmer with time and turn into what?
Cool off
Black dwarfs
White dwarfs with the same mass of the sun are about the same size of what?
The earth
Higher mass dwarfs are what?
Smaller
Quantum mechanics says that electrons must move faster as they are what?
squeezed into a very small space
why cant white dwarfs not be more massive then 1.4msun?
because nothing can move faster than light
what can happen to a white dwarf in a close binary system?
accretion disks. matter orbits the white dwarf
massive star supernova
iron core of massive collapses into a neutron star or a black hole, causing an explosion
white dwarf supernova
by mass flow from red giant binary companion
H to He fusion of a layer of accreted matter; white dwarf left intact
Nova
complete explosion of white dwarf: nothing left behind
White dwarf super nova
how to tell differences between massive star and white dwarf
light curves differ (white dwarf supernova is brighter)
-spectra differ (exploding white dwarfs don’t have hydrogen absorption line.)
using ____ telescope in 1967, Jocelyn bell noticed ___________ pulses of radio emission coming from a single part of the sky
radio
very regular
the pulses were coming from a rapidly rotating neutron star, which was called what?
pulsar
