The Mystery of White Dwarfs With Intense Magnetic Fields Could Finally Be Solved
4 MAY 2021
There's a lot we don't understand about white dwarf stars, but one mystery may finally have a solution: how do some of these cosmic objects end up having insanely powerful magnetic fields?
According to new calculations and modelling, these super-dense objects can have a magnetosphere-generating dynamo - but the strongest white dwarf magnetic fields, a million times more powerful than Earth's, only occur within certain contexts.
Not only does the research resolve several long-standing problems, but once again it shows that very similar phenomena can be observed in wildly different astronomical objects, and that sometimes the Universe is more like itself than we might initially think.