White Dwarf Stars

These tiny earth-size stars are compressed on the brink of becoming a black hole.

Compressing a star is no easy feat. In space no one can hear you scream, but there is another thing there is nothing to push against. This is because space has nothing in it. However there are many interesting flavours of space being nothing but that is a story and a universe of imagination a blog post far far away. So with nothing to push against, you have to bring your own wall or other words rocket fuel. When you follow the black board maths you have to rocket out a lot of material like well over half to get the smaller fraction in the final white dwarf. Imagine if you will a helpful grocery assistant offering to help fill your boot up with veggies, and coming with over ten trolley loads and he (or she or it if it is a crazed robo- grocery assistant) then proceeds to pack by chucking most outside the boot. In space this packing is seen as a huge plume, cloud, or to use the latin nebulae.

Now if you have ever stuffed anything you will know that you have to have a container, jar, cupboard, sleeping bag cover, underpants draw or any bag that you mum noted "It's not going to fit in that". Now just a note for our non-Australian readers, and there are a few and they have a right to be non-Australian, its not their fault, stuffed is a special word in Australia. "Honey, I stuffed the dish washer" would translate loosely as "Oh esteemed loved one of even temper and just disposition, I (the same in most languages dialects) have rendered a vital piece of equipment central to our happiness not functional". Another example, though I have warned you and claiming "I read it in a blog" is not going to help you get out of a head lock, another example is saying to an Aussie policemen "Get stuffed".

So not so much how do I stuff a star, and by the way white dwarfs are stuffed stars they aren't doing that merry little E=mc2 after a few billion year shining look at me, I am star. They are stuffed. It is not so much the stuffing, but how do they remain stuffed. When I use the word "remain" I am using this word at industrial strength. Remained in this context is until the death of the universe. White dwarfs who got in early in the first years of the universe are still out their dimming away, now only a few thousand degrees, not making energy, not cooling down like the good old days and it 13.8 billion year o'clock. So what is this stuffing bag in which we stuff stars so they are completely stuffed? Well, if you rewind this blog to the word "blackboard" and use the latest blog enhancement software you will probably make out the Gravitation formula, written in the corner. The rest of us will just fake it and say we saw it at the time. What is really interesting about this formula is not the big M which is the stars mass, but the sneaky little r hiding below the line up to its old reciprocal tricks. Never trust a formula. And what would you expect it wearing a 2, meaning its inverse square. So it has a trick, when you make it smaller it is way bigger. Let's think about this, particularly as I am getting typing practice. 1/1 is a lot bigger that 1/ 100 ^ 2, 1 it 10,000 times bigger that 1/10,000.
However 'one on a hundredth squared' is 10,000. That means taking the Earth as an easy to visualize example, if we were to stuff our planet from a radius of 6100 km down to 61 km two things would happen. The gravitational field strength would be 10 000 times larger. This means schools on tiny stuffed earth would have to use 9800 m s-2 in their calculations and in the problem of the teacher being thrown out the second story window, the teacher in stead of hitting the ground in 1 sec would hit the ground in a hundredth of a second, we inside the reaction time of any student timing the event. Yes the teacher would also hit the ground not at 9.8 ms-1 but at 980 ms-1 and yes you could do a speed of sound experiment. The second thing to consider is that the material in your stuffed star is going to be rather compressed. This state of affairs is blithely called
'gravitational collapse'.

So white dwarfs are epic all time fails and fascinating to get into the last days saga covered in the Podcast. What I fascinates me is that they are zombie undead stars way out in space, staggering distance from us. This contrast with the number of souls ever so close to us that live their lives never pondering matter under lock down.

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