Astronomy 1021 Chapter 18: Chapter 18 Summary Cosmic Perspective

• School: Western University
• Department: Astronomy
• Course: Astronomy 1021
• Professor: Chris Racknor

Document Summary

Despite the strange nature of stellar corpses clear evidence exists for white dwarfs and neutron stars and the case for black holes is very strong. White dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes can all have close stellar companions from which they accrete matter, these binary systems produce some of the most spectacular events in the universe including novae, white dwarf supernovae, and x-ray bursters. Black holes are holes in the observable universe that strongly warp space and time around them, the nature of black hole singularities remains beyond the frontier of current scientific understanding. A neutron star is the ball of neutrons created by the collapse of the iron core in a massive star supernova, it resembles a giant atomic nucleus 10km in radius but more massive than the sun. White dwarf: the hot compact corpses of low mass stars typically with a mass similar to that of the sun compressed to a volume the size of the earth.