A German space expert who helps NASA discover the dwarf star

11:52 p

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

LOS ANGELES (AFP)

A German space expert working on a project led by NASA has discovered the oldest and coldest white dwarf star known to date, and is heavily surrounded by debris and dust, the US space agency said in a statement. .

Melina Tefnot, a volunteer who compiled data from NASA 's Enveraged Survey Explorer survey explorer as part of the Backyard Worlds project, discovered remnants of the planet' s size. a dead star (no nuclear fusion) during his research. In the archives of the European Space Agency.

The German expert was looking for brown dwarfs – objects larger than the planets – when she found something brighter and farther away.

The information was presented at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which then used one of the largest telescopes in the world at the Hawaii Cake Observatory to study the white dwarf.

Tefenot, one of the 150,000 volunteer scientists working on the Backyard Worlds project, said the ability to communicate with such impressive resources was "a catalyst" for the project.

Mark Kouchner, project manager, said that working with volunteer scientists "always leads to surprises".

"They are eager to work excessively, the project has just celebrated its second birthday and they have already discovered more than 1,000 objects that could be brown dwarves," he said.

NASA has stated that the white dwarf, nicknamed "J0207", is about 145 light-years from the constellation Capricorn, about three billion years old, based on a temperature of 5,800 degrees Celsius.

Scientists believe it could be the first white dwarf to have multiple dust bands, forcing astronomers to "examine planetary systems models and could help us identify the distant future of our solar system," said one spokesperson for NASA. .

"The white dwarf J0207 is very old," said John Deppes, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and a member of the project.

"Most of the models that scientists have designed to explain episodes about white dwarfs do not work properly until they reach 100 million years ago, so this star challenges our assumptions about how planetaries are changing. "