AST 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Electron Degeneracy Pressure, Solar Mass, Triple-Alpha Process
Document Summary
As mentioned above, the central star is now electron degenerate, so it is no longer collapsing, nor is it generating energy from fusion. Such an object is called a white dwarf star. These stars form a sequence in the h-r diagram that is roughly parallel to the main sequence, but shifted to much lower luminosity at a given temperature. The first observational signal of the existence of white. Dwarf stars came from the discovery in the 1840s of a periodic wobble in the parallax measurements for. This led to the prediction of the existence of a faint binary companion to sirius that was finally observed in the 1860s. As sirius had a measured parallax, and because the orbit could be directly traced in both position and velocity, it was possible at the time to work out the luminosities and masses of both components:
