who discovered the white dwarf stars?

Answer 1

I know it's not a very specific answer but:

In 1862 Alvan Graham Clark discovered a dark companion of the brightest star Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris). The companion, called Sirius B or the Pup, had a surface temperature of about 25,000 K, so it was classified as a hot star. However, Sirius B was about 10,000 times fainter than the primary, Sirius A. Since it was very bright per unit of surface area, the Pup had to be much smaller than Sirius A, with roughly the diameter of the Earth.

Analysis of the orbit of the Sirius star system showed that the mass of the Pup was almost the same as that of our own Sun. This implied that Sirius B was thousands of times more dense than lead. As more white dwarfs were found, astronomers began to discover that white dwarfs are common in our galaxy. In 1917 Adriaan Van Maanen discovered Van Maanen's Star, the second known white dwarf.

After the discovery of quantum mechanics in the 1920's, an explanation for the density of white dwarfs was found in 1926. R.H. Fowler explained the high densities in an article "Dense matter" (Monthly Notices R. Astron. Soc. 87, 114-122) using the electron degenerate pressure a few months after the formulation of the Fermi-Dirac statistics for an electron, on which the electron pressure is based.

S. Chandrasekhar discovered in 1930 (Astroph. J. 1931, vol. 74, p. 81-82) in an article called "The maximum mass of ideal white dwarfs" that no white dwarf can be more massive than about 1.4 solar masses. This is now called the Chandrasekhar limit. Chandrasekhar received the Nobel prize (along with Fowler) in 1983.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has recently spotted what may be comet dust sprinkled around the white dwarf star G29-38, which died approximately 500 million years ago. The findings suggest the dead star, which most likely consumed its inner planets, is still orbited by a ring of surviving comets and possibly outer planets. This is the first observational evidence that comets can outlive their stars.

I hope it's of some assistance at least :-)

Answer 2

Alvan Clark

Answer 3

Snow White. I believe there were 7 of them.

Answer 4

me.