Cheating Death: New Theory Explains White Dwarfs’ Cooling Conundrum

New research reveals that white dwarf stars stop cooling due to floating crystals in their interior, offering insights into stellar aging processes.

In a paper published on March 6 in Nature, scholars from the Institute for Advanced Study; the University of Victoria, Canada; and the University of Warwick, U.K., have proposed a new theory that explains why a puzzling population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for ten billion years.

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you’ll likely learn that they are “dead stars” that continuously cool down over time. The cooling occurs because the white dwarfs have depleted their nuclear heat source. In the classic picture, this causes the dense plasma in a white dwarf’s interior to freeze, leading the star to solidify from the inside out.