NASA German volunteer discovers "white dwarf star"

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

Melina Tiffenot, one of the volunteers who compiled data from NASA's Space Telescope as part of the Backyard Worlds Project, discovered remains the size of a dead star (without nuclear fusion), when review of ESA files.

The German expert was looking for brown dwarfs, larger than the planets but less than the stars when they found something brighter and farther away. The information was presented at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which then used one of the world's largest telescopes located in the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study the white dwarf, according to the agency. German press.

Tefenot, one of the 150,000 volunteer scientists working on the Backyard Worlds project, said the ability to connect to such impressive resources was "really exciting" 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 only celebrated its second birthday and has already discovered more than a thousand objects likely to be brown dwarves," he said.

NASA said the white dwarf, dubbed J0207, is about 145 light years from the Capricorn star group, about three billion years old, based on a temperature of 5800 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. .

John Deebes, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and a member of the project, said the white dwarf J0207 was very old. "Most of the models that scientists have designed to explain the rings on white dwarfs do not work properly until they reach 100 million years ago, so this star challenges our assumptions about how the systems planetaries are changing. "