Undead White Dwarfs Discovered

Astronomers and planetary scientists are guilty of constantly anthropomorphizing space objects, and giving in to the temptation to see familiar shapes in the stars.

The way we steal the language of what it means to be alive can sometimes get a bit disturbing though. We talk about stars as being alive when they have nuclear reactions going on in their cores, and we call them dead when… well… they don’t have nuclear reactions in their cores.

For about 100 years, we’ve referred to white dwarfs as dead stars. These moon-sized objects are the leftover…