White Dwarfs and Stellar Remnants: What Happens After a Star Dies, Explained for Adult Beginners in Astronomy

When a star dies, it does not simply go dark. It transforms into something the universe has never been able to produce any other way: matter at densities and temperatures and magnetic field strengths so extreme that the physics governing it sits at the frontier of human knowledge. The Sun will leave behind a crystallizing white dwarf the size of Earth. A star ten times more massive will leave a neutron star twenty kilometers across spinning hundreds of times per second. A star twenty times more massive will leave a black hole from which not even light escapes. This book explains all three fates in full. White Dwarfs and Stellar Remnants is a complete account of what stars leave behind, written for adult readers who want the real physics without the simplification. You will understand why electron degeneracy pressure, a quantum mechanical consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle, can support the mass of the Sun inside a sphere the size of Earth regardless of temperature, and why this same pressure fails above the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.44 solar masses and the white dwarf collapses to a neutron star. You will follow Jocelyn Bell's 1967 discovery of pulsars, the brief internal designation of the source as LGM-1 for Little Green Men, and the eventual understanding that pulsars are rotating neutron stars sweeping radio beams across the sky with the precision of atomic clocks. You will learn how the double pulsar J0737-3039 tests general relativity to 0.05 percent accuracy, how magnetar giant flares release more energy in one second than the Sun emits in 150,000 years, and how the 2017 gravitational wave detection of two merging neutron stars produced a kilonova that was observed by more than 70 telescopes simultaneously and showed gold being synthesized in real time. And you will understand how the Type Ia supernova explosions of white dwarfs led to the 1998 discovery of dark energy and the Nobel Prize that followed. Twelve chapters. The complete science of stellar death, from the Sun's future white dwarf through the neutron star pulsars and magnetars to the black holes and the gravitational waves they produce when they merge. Every major type of stellar remnant covered. Every key physical mechanism explained from first principles. Part of the Stars and Galaxies Adult Series.